Storm Tide (48 page)

All the usual nuts filled the seats. Palmer Compton had his boy by his side. Johnny smiled. “Hello, Palmer,” he said, and got a grunt in return. There were all the other conspirators from Gordon Stone’s group; Dr. Garvey in his natty bow tie and even Judith Silver, looking, he had to say it, delightful in her gray wool coatdress. Word had it David had not been over on the island since Gordon’s death; you had to give him that. So what if the opposition far outnumbered Johnny’s own troops tonight? He hadn’t bothered sounding the alarm. He felt almost serene as he watched the drama unfold, as if he was a visitor from far away, come to observe the curious behavior of the natives. Let them rail against the dike—and rail they did—a full two hours, as Ralph and Fred seemed to shrink in their seats. Johnny yawned.

It was a quarter past ten when Ralph gaveled discussion to a halt, looking at Johnny in the back row as if to say, This wasn’t my idea. Johnny responded with a simple smile.

“Mr. Chairman.”

“Mrs. Powell.”

“I move that this Board of Selectmen do what we rightly should have done many years ago, that is to open the Tamar River dike.”

“Second.” Lyle Upham beamed at the applauding crowd.

Ralph looked pale and tired. His voice was pure defeat. “The motion on the floor is to open the dike.”

“Mr. Chairman, I move to refer the motion to a committee,” David Greene said.

Johnny thought he hadn’t quite heard him at first. Refer to committee? What was Greene trying to do? Where did he pick that up? “Mr. Chairman,” Johnny shouted. “I rise to a point of order!”

“Excuse me, Mr. Chairman.” David Greene again. “Mr. Lynch is not a member of this board … any longer. He can’t call for a point of order.” The little prick smiled straight at Johnny.

Above the noise in the hall, Fred Fischel glanced from Petersen to Greene, obviously confused. “I second the motion to refer.”

The fool. What did he think he was doing? A referral to committee would delay action either way, the one thing that could hurt Johnny. He couldn’t believe where this was going.

“Debate on the motion is allowed.” Ralph’s voice was lighter, infused with hope. “Mr. Greene.”

“I believe this is one of the most controversial issues in the history of the town,” David Greene said. “I think it’s only prudent to study the matter further. We have approximately $25,000 left in the consultancy line of the budget. I move we form a committee to draw up a request for a proposal to seek an engineering study that might tell us the effects of either opening or closing the dike.”

Johnny was on his feet. “That’ll take years!” he heard himself shouting.

Ralph banged his gavel. “I believe the floor is Mr. Greene’s.”

“As Mr. Lynch himself has pointed out many times, Mr. Chairman, the dike has been in place for over twenty years. It would be imprudent and rash of us to eliminate it without study.”

“You’re stalling, you little bastard!” Johnny felt sweat under his collar. “You think I can’t see through your cheap parliamentary tricks.” The bank would not wait for a study; studies took years. He’d be stuck with the property until he died. He’d never cash out. “Yes or no, up or down. It’s time to decide. We can’t have this hanging over us.”

“Mr. Lynch!” Petersen was shouting now, glancing worriedly at the reporters in the front row. “Mr. Lynch, sit down.”

David Greene continued, “If we make the wrong decision, as Mr. Lynch, an esteemed attorney and former town counsel knows, we could open the town up to a significant lawsuit.”

Before Johnny could shoot his hand up to answer the patronizing bastard, a hundred people were clamoring to speak. He couldn’t see Ralph through the waving arms, but debate was cut off. They were already voting as he lumbered to the aisle.

“All those in favor of referring the motion to a committee …” Three hands flew up. “Those opposed …” Two. “The motion passes.”

Palmer Compton leapt on a chair and called them all cowards for not opening the dike once and for all. Joe Pound cornered Upham and Palmer. Fischel huddled with Ralph Petersen and a hundred conversations echoed in the room. Johnny couldn’t believe what he’d witnessed, what had slipped through his hands. The reality of his situation weighed
like sand in his arms and legs. He could not move. Two reporters stood at his shoulder, asking questions. Ralph Petersen said as he brushed past that he would call the office in the morning. But they were all a blur to Johnny. He saw one thing and one thing only: Judith Silver smiling at him. As another lawyer, she understood as well as Johnny did how thoroughly he had just been skewered.

J
UDITH

    It was a late February day of tentative sunshine and low scudding clouds when Judith buried Portnoy under the Sargent’s weeping hemlock, where Gordon’s ashes were. The gray cat had always been Gordon’s. He had died gradually, like Gordon. The vet said kidney failure, but she knew it was a failure of the will to live. The other deserter was Trey, the three-legged dog, who had attached himself to Stumpy. He needed a male pack leader, and Stumpy seemed flattered and willing to take him in. The other cats and the remaining dog, Silkie, were hers.

It was a quiet winter. Only Natasha came to visit. Judith spoke frequently to Hannah, had supper twice a week with Barbara. She spent more time with all her women friends and made herself go to Boston to see an evening of dance or music every month. She did not read much, because she found herself thinking of Gordon instead of paying attention. On television, sitcoms were too concerned with love and domesticity, medical shows were lethal, so she watched cops, science fiction, documentaries about anything—Antarctica, gerbils, any war, the homeless, coal mining. She took to bringing home videos. She played music loudly, to fill the silences in the house. The house was too big for her, but she could scarcely tear down half of it. She simply closed up the rooms she was not using.

At first she spent an occasional hour in Gordon’s room, to conjure him up. Natasha put a stop to that. “It’s morbid, keeping the room that way. Besides, it stinks. You have to clear it out. It doesn’t make me think of how Daddy was. Only how he died. It’s just a sickroom.”

Together they bundled up Gordon’s clothes and took them to Goodwill. “Somebody will like the warm sweaters and good coats and jackets,” Judith said, weeping as she put them into boxes. But she would not let Natasha clear out his office. Two of his colleagues had promised to go through his papers next July and decide if there was anything publishable, what should be kept or archived.

Finally she took out his videos from several television appearances, a taped lecture from Capetown, and spent an evening watching them. That night she did not sleep. In the morning she put them away in his office, where she would not be tempted to look at them again for a long,
long time. She felt as if the tentative skin that had grown over her wound had been torn off.

So the winter passed into March. Now the ground was thawed and the first migrating birds were passing overhead, sometimes settling in the compound. Ducks rested overnight in the pitch pines, one roosting over Gordon’s grave. She accepted an invitation to dinner from a lawyer who lived two towns farther up the Cape. It was a pleasant enough evening. Timothy was even taller than Gordon had been and thin as a rapier. His hair had receded, leaving the top of his head quite bald, although it was still thick and brown on the sides. His forehead seemed to go on and on, marked only by slight eyebrows perpetually surprised. Timothy had a deep baritone that he could use to fine effect in the courtroom. His skin was tanned even in late March, for he was an avid boater and always took off a couple of weeks during the winter to sail around the Caribbean. He sailed all winter, keeping his boat in a harbor that usually stayed free of ice on the Sound. He offered to take her out, but she said she’d wait for spring. She saw Timothy again the next week. And the next.

She was not immediately drawn to him as she had been to David, but perhaps this was a more intelligent attraction: he was in her field, a professional, divorced with a daughter he seemed reasonably attentive to. He saw his daughter weekends, which slowed down the progress of their relationship. That was good, for she was in no hurry. She knew she had to see men now, to resume her life. At twenty, dating had felt natural; at forty-one, it seemed a foolish and tedious game. The thought of starting from zero with someone and having to explain exactly who she was, to explain her life, exhausted her in anticipation. She was pleased to have found a sensible man with obligations and standing in the community. Since they were both part of the same collegiality of lawyers practicing in the same courts, they knew a certain amount about each other.

She went out with a recently divorced therapist once and once only. He had a condescending attitude she found abrasive. Mattie introduced her to a somewhat younger man, David’s age, who had just moved to the Cape and opened a chiropractic office. He was full of didactic advice on what to eat and what she must not eat, to the degree that supper with him was a duel. No, Timothy was the best man she had interviewed, as it were, and if she was in no hurry to rush into an affair, he seemed equally cautious. They settled into a pattern of eating supper together every Thursday and afterward taking in a movie or a play. The first Saturday in April, he introduced her to his ten-year-old daughter, Amy, and they spent the afternoon at an ice-skating rink.
Timothy was astonished that Judith had never before put on a pair of skates. She did her best to remain upright, but the next day she was sore. Her back felt out. If it stayed this way, she might have to see that didactic chiropractor. She had begun tomato and pepper seedlings inside, half her usual number. Natasha came home every three weeks or so. She had a new boyfriend she was considering bringing on spring break. Judith hoped she would like him, but knew herself hard to win over as far as Natasha’s boyfriends went. None seemed worthy. She would try to be more tolerant.

“Do you ever see David?” Natasha asked as they were turning over the garden, about to start planting the hardiest crops.

“I’ve gone to the selectmen’s meetings a few times. But you’d be surprised how long you can go without running into someone, even in a town this small. I get my mail delivered. He picks his up at the post office. I shop on Saturdays. I use the Shell station. A few small changes of pattern, and you can avoid almost anyone.”

Natasha leaned on her shovel. “Why do you need to avoid him?”

“Why do I need to see him?”

“You don’t ever think about getting together with him?”

“Do you think we should plant the bok choi in the row next to the lettuce? Or should we put the leeks there?”

D
AVID

    During Christmas school vacation I flew down to Florida. Since Terry’s first letter, we’d exchanged a couple more and talked most Sunday nights on the phone. But a lifetime apart was hard to make up in two weeks, in spite of our best intentions. The weather didn’t help. A cold snap froze half the state’s citrus crop. We canceled our camping trip and spent two weeks shuttling between theme parks, Epcot, MGM, Busch Gardens, sleeping late, eating pizza, watching TV, playing catch in the parking lots and arguing about all the things I made him do that his mother didn’t. Any notions I’d had about him were nothing more than that—notions. He was a sweet and energetic kid and headstrong just like my sister at his age, but Wynn’s death and Cesar’s departure had left him bitter and scared.

Our arguments spun full-blown out of nothing. Sometimes Terry flailed at me; sometimes he sulked and wouldn’t speak. He was pushing, testing my limits. Who was this son of a bitch who showed up and called himself Father Number Three? I’d been a sentimental idiot to imagine Terry would have welcomed Laramie. He was fiercely jealous of his half siblings. He would have torn Laramie apart. I didn’t blame myself for Terry’s problems, but I wondered what the hell I had thought I was doing: sacrificing my life to one lost little boy, while my own son didn’t know who to call Daddy—his grandfather or a stable hand who passed himself off as a trainer.