Storm Tide (45 page)

It was past one
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. when I saw the first diver blow water from his mouthpiece, adjust his mask and plunge. He shifted the searchlight between his hands. I heard bubbles playing on the surface. By this time, the tires of the car were visible, like the paws of a dog on its back. I seemed to have lost the strength to stand. I leaned against what was left of the railing. Island people were huddled along the causeway. Finally the diver broke the surface. “The driver’s side window is smashed,” he said, swallowing. “No one in the driver’s seat. One body in back. Looks to me like a kid.”

D
AVID

    Crystal’s body was discovered at daybreak the following morning and wrested from the mud by a small hovercraft. Using a canvas winch fastened beneath her arms, the vessel tugged until the vacuum was broken and she was lifted aboard. A Coast Guard helicopter circled above a small army of rescue personnel and their assembled vehicles, news vans and photographers and a hundred onlookers come to gawk behind a yellow cordon strung up by the police. I watched from the bridge. I heard a radio barking orders, trucks spinning tires in the sand, car doors slamming, and above it all voices asking, Who was she? Why did she climb out the window? Why did she leave the little boy?

I tried to call Crystal’s mother that day, but I could not find her address or phone number. It was Johnny Lynch who called her father. Far from dead, as she had told me, he was living in New York outside Troy, remarried and raising Airedales. He drove down at once, a heavyset red-faced man with bulging pale blue eyes, a shambling walk and slightly slurred voice. He seemed overcome and kept wiping his forehead and then his eyes. “I gave her that Olds when she was on her way here. She stopped with us for a month. I had it fixed up for her. It’s such a big car, I thought it was safe for her and the boy. I gave it to her because the wreck she was driving had bad brakes. I thought it was a safe car ….”

He said he would take the bodies back to Troy, after the autopsy was completed. He wrung my hand. “She thought she could get a better job here. We didn’t have room for her to stay with us, but there were apartments. She thought she could do better for herself here. Now look what’s happened!”

I meant to arrange some kind of memorial for Crystal and Laramie, but the day after the accident my mother informed me there would be a morning service in the Catholic church. Crystal was not Catholic. The service was not held in the sanctuary nor conducted by a priest. Johnny arranged for the basement hall. In Quaker style, all those whose lives had been touched by the deceased would rise and speak their minds.

Laramie’s third-grade class attended, and one by one the students stood to say goodbye. The women in the office rose next and then my sister. Michelle sobbed through the entire service. Tommy sat a little apart from her, rubbing his nose as if it itched. Johnny Lynch wore a
black pin-striped suit, a gray vest, and strode the stage like a bad Shakespearean actor. “Lamentation” and “mortal flesh” and “heartache” left his lips.

Beside me, my mother cried. “If only you had told her the truth …”

“A tragedy?” he intoned. “Or a tragic allegory?” He brought his hand to his heart. “A young mother wandering in the darkness, searching for help for her child.”

Why did I feel Johnny’s hand in Crystal’s death? Why had Johnny left with her that night? Ten people told me Crystal had gone off with him. Where did they go? What did he tell her? I had no concrete reason to suspect him. Maybe I just needed someone else to blame. But Johnny Lynch had sent her across that bridge.

I delayed dealing with my house for a week, until I could not put it off. An open cookbook on the kitchen counter; a stack of folded laundry. Everything seemed to wait for them to return: Laramie’s marking pens, Crystal’s clothes. Crystal had astonishingly few clothes. Four dresses in the closet, five skirts, five pairs of pants. One drawer of underpants and socks. Another of sweaters and shirts. Laramie’s closet was crammed with jeans she had ironed, flannel-lined khakis, corduroys; plaid shirts and plain. There were two winter coats. A little blue blazer. He had one drawer for underwear, another for socks, one more for sweaters. I counted three pairs of sneakers, six pairs of shoes, a new pair of winter boots. I had never noticed how very well dressed she had kept him; how little she spent on herself. Really, the only thing she wanted was a father for her child.

I spent the weekend in the house, sitting mostly, walking from room to room. I wrote a letter to Crystal’s mother, whose address her father gave me. I attempted to read: minutes of meetings; the
Baseball Almanac
; Robert’s Rules; a tide chart—anything that promised some semblance of order. Saturday night I wrote to Liam. Sunday morning I just stared at Laramie’s drawings on the refrigerator. The faded ones showed three figures in a house; in the newer ones they were replaced by flames.

Crystal had dragged an old student desk from my garage to use as a vanity. There she sat every morning applying her eye makeup when she came in fresh from the shower, wrapped in a towel. Laramie would be calling for chocolate milk, the TV screaming cartoons, the dryer would buzz or a bowl would break, while Crystal outlined her eyes with the concentration of a master jeweler. Laramie and I lived all over the house. I had weights in the living room, books over the toilet, piles of mail and magazines on the kitchen table. Laramie’s space rangers and action toys were on every shelf and chair. But Crystal had one yellow
desk in front of a mirror. I never approached it until she was dead, and then, cautiously, as if she’d appear any minute, as if I was spying.

Twenty perfumes, all samples, all recalling the way she used her middle finger to daub a drop between her thighs. Lipsticks, liners, nail polish, deodorant, lotions, face creams, depilatory; boxes of pins; of tweezers. I was ashamed to think this: they’re still half full. What a waste to throw them out. Of course I did, quickly into a plastic bag.

In the bottom drawer, blond hair dye and a hair dryer. Tampons and pads and birth control pills. A box of sewing supplies. Some prescription painkillers from Las Vegas. I emptied the drawer and moved on. The next drawer was full of photos and postcards. I recognized a very young Crystal in jeans and tee-shirt with, yes, Billy Lynch, Johnny’s second son. I remembered him, all right. A bully, but once I started playing baseball, he left me alone. Crystal in a prom dress in front of a saguaro cactus, a grinning Mexican-looking guy with his arm around her. Crystal with a blond lady who must be her mother. I’m sure I never met her. The woman was wearing a suit a little too tight and a big corsage. Crystal was dressed as a bridesmaid and beside her mother stood the bride, also blond. On the back, Crystal had written “Didi’s Wedding” and dated it eight years ago. There was nothing to suggest Crystal had ever seen her mother or her sister since. What had happened at that wedding?

One photo taken in an arcade showed Crystal and a redheaded guy mugging. Another showed pregnant Crystal with a bald biker. Crystal, a baby (Laramie?), and a middle-aged guy. An uncle? Crystal in Disneyland with Laramie, now three or four. Crystal in western gear posed in front of the Mirage volcano in Las Vegas, her boot up on the fence to show her leg. A studio portrait of Laramie looking serious and hopeful. Crystal with her arms around two guys, in a black bat-girl Halloween costume. A page from a magazine: “Six Ways to Firm Your Breasts.” Crystal in a nightie, pouting for the camera. Crystal without a shirt on, palms across her nipples. Always her eyes seemed to be asking the camera, am I okay? Am I doing it right? Is this enough?

The one photo I kept was of Crystal holding Laramie, perhaps two, in her lap. For once, she was not looking at the camera at all, but at him with an expression so intense, it almost frightened me. The men in these photos, they appeared and disappeared, but at the center was her son.

A flattened sprig of lavender crumbled in my hand. A wine label. A black elastic garter wrapped around a matchbook: “Congratulations, Robert and Katherine Ann!” Were they good friends or relatives? Who had she gone to their wedding with? Were they still married? I had a hundred questions about every item in the drawer, an almost physical
yearning to know her. I had been afraid to probe, to know too much, to be drawn too far in. Now I felt afraid even to turn around. Crystal was in that room with me; over my shoulder; touching my ear, whispering, “Why couldn’t you love me enough to ask?”

I had no words to describe the turmoil I felt. Nor was anyone able to say a thing that made sense to me, except, oddly enough, Liam, whose response to my letter arrived with surprising speed.

I’d written him because I thought he should know; because I’d wish to know if a son of mine, however unwanted, had died. Liam was guilty; Liam was innocent. I felt I understood him in a way I never expected anyone to understand me.

Dear David,

I have to admit I was reluctant to reply. I never really knew the boy. I can’t say I feel responsible, except for fooling around with his mother, but no one, least of all the innocent himself, deserves a fate such as this. I can’t be sending you any money toward the funeral, if that’s what you’d be wanting, only my sincere regrets. It was a tragedy for the mother and son, for us all. What you tell me happened doesn’t make sense, but I guess there’s no understanding something so sad. What can I say but that Crystal was a troubled girl and I was an idiot. May all my sins be forgiven.

At that I said, Amen.

I sat with Liam’s note for almost an hour, reading it over and over in the post office parking lot. A single phrase repeated itself to me then and for hours after. “What you tell me happened doesn’t make sense …”

Later that day, I called the chief of police and asked to see the autopsy report.

J
UDITH

    Gordon died in her arms exactly two weeks after Rosh Hashanah at 3:35
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. The last forty-eight hours had been very bad. He went into convulsions, then slipped into unconsciousness. Occasionally he came to, briefly. His breathing was hoarse and loud, then almost inaudible. He moaned and gasped out nonsense. She sat behind him in bed holding him and stroking him, sometimes singing to him, sometimes just talking in a soothing voice about how much she loved him. His agony was protracted and she was torn between wanting him to stay with her and recognizing he could not endure more and must let go. The strength of his will was keeping him alive by the barest thread. Then she felt it snap. His eyes flew open and his body grew rigid, then limp. His eyes were glazed. She could find no pulse.

It was a quiet night and she could hear the surf after she could no longer hear his halting breath. The surf was up because a tropical storm had passed far out to sea, only the waves and the occasional lost pelagic bird marking its power. Almost at once his body began to cool. Entropy. The end of her life as she had known it. Portnoy remained on the bed, and she allowed him to sniff Gordon’s face. He knew. He jumped off the bed, his fur on edge, and went straight to the door demanding to go out. She was afraid he would somehow commit feline suicide, get caught by a coyote, fall in the marsh mud. “No,” she said quietly. She would keep him in all week, until he had adjusted to Gordon’s absence. She was alone here with the animals, and they would need her. And she would need them.

She told everyone she called they did not have to come. Gordon had insisted on cremation, which she regretted. She would be buried, and she had hoped they would have side-by-side graves. She had not been raised to believe in cremation and could not suddenly embrace it. But Gordon had been insistent, and she would honor his wishes. It had all been arranged. It would be done immediately. There would be a brief Jewish service. She would dig the ashes into the patio of the compound, as he had requested, and in spring she would plant a low growing tree the winds would not injure. A dwarf conifer, perhaps. They had discussed everything, endlessly. Nonetheless she experienced a deep shock as the two undertaker’s men carried him out to their hearse in a body bag.