The Shore (18 page)

“This is not what you want. Give them to me.”

His voice was warm and smooth and so certain of itself; the seed slid from between her lips and into her palm before she knew that she was spitting it out, and he knelt down and took them out of her hand.

“Are you so hopeless?”

“Look at what I have become,” she answered.

“But think of what you can become again. What revenge is this, removing the only thorn in your husband's side?”

“He isn't my husband,” she spat.

“Then let the world know. Shame him, expose him, cast him out. But don't do this.”

“They would take his side—he has everyone in the palm of his hand.”

“There is no one from his past that would take your revenge for you?”

He was kneeling above her, looking down at her, and was at the best vantage point to see the smile that spread slowly across
her face, crinkling even the permanently closed left eye, and in that moment he knew why his grandmother had chosen him to be the one to go after the woman. He stepped over her and pulled her to her feet. She tried to stand on her own but stumbled into him instead; her hip had gone stiff and cold from lying still. He bent to gather up her basket, her bottles.

“Leave them,” she said. “I don't have a use for poisons anymore.”

“Better to take them with us than risk fools finding them and coming to grief,” he said, and settled her in the nose of the boat next to the detritus of her aborted revenge.

She would remember those minutes as a turning point, another rebirth in a life full of rebirths. But as she sat in her boat, waiting for him to come back, to row her to his grandmother's lodge, she did not feel as though she were being reborn. All she felt was an odd little flutter in her stomach, a jumping in her chest, a warm prickle beneath her skin every time she looked at him.

1981

S
OMETIMES
I
T
H
URTS

I
found them half-naked in the forsythia bushes the spring after Mom died, a guy I didn't know on top of my sister Mo, with his big, loose mouth all over her neck. Was expecting to find a rabbit, from the noise I'd heard. At first I thought he was hurting her; her face was all twisted up in a grimace, and the way she was laying couldn't have been comfortable. Didn't even think, just hauled him up by the collar and whaled away at him, his jeans all bunched up around his ankles and his skinny white legs trying to kick out at me in spite of them. Mo didn't make a noise, just fumbled her skirt back down and her shirt back up and stayed right in that spot where the heat and weight of them had pressed the grass down.

After I finished with him I threw him toward the driveway, and he stumbled a few feet before he went over in the grass.

“You stay the fuck away from my sister, you fucking degenerate!” He curled up like he expected me to kick him, started blubbering but the only word I caught was “sir” repeated over and over. I realized then that he wasn't anything but a stupid little kid playing at being grown up the only way he knew how, but even if he hadn't meant to hurt her didn't mean that he hadn't
managed to. When I turned around Mo shrunk down like she expected me to start whaling away on her too, but I scooped her up around the middle and hauled her back inside; she was sixteen and too old for me to be throwing her around like a little kid, but for once she didn't fight me.

No one else was home. I plunked her down in one of the kitchen chairs, and she watched me like a cat as I dug up two of Mom's cut-glass tumblers, threw ice into them, and nearly filled them with Dad's whiskey. All the wheels were clicking in my head right then, but I didn't say anything until I'd set her glass down in front of her and taken a long drink.

“What the hell were you two doing?”

It took half her glass for her to tell me that Johnny was just a sometimes thing. As was Stevo, and Roddy, and Chick, and a whole bunch of other names I'd never heard before. It didn't really feel good in her body but it made her feel better in her head, how she was all they were thinking about for the ten or fifteen minutes they took, and most of the time the five or six days she strung them along beforehand. I just sat there, rubbing my forehead and slugging down booze, and feeling a hundred years old and more like a dad than I ever wanted to. I'd never felt that way about people, never wanted to get my bits all up in theirs like that, didn't know how to talk to her about this because it made me sick just thinking about it but knowing that I had to because no one else was going to do it. But I was glad in a weird way that I knew, because it made sense now how she was never home. Why she didn't talk to me anymore.

“And what exactly are you doing to keep from finding out one day that you've got some peach-fuzzed boy's baby coming without any idea who it belongs to?” I finally had to ask.

“I'm not letting them squirt it inside me. Nothing bad's happened yet.” She sulked a little when she said it.

“Well, thank God it hasn't. Jesus Christ, Mo…” I couldn't think of what to say after that, so we sat at the table, sipping whiskey, until she'd had enough to start filling in the details on the boys, telling me who had a car of his own and who was working on getting into college someday and who was really sweet, down deep. I couldn't give any advice like I thought I should be able to, but I could shut up and listen, and I was so glad that she was finally talking again that that's what I did.

Mom died when I was nineteen, in February of '65. It happened fast; one day she didn't feel so good, the next she was in a casket. It shocked us all, but more than anyone it shook up Mo. I'd been finished with high school and doing tig welding for my Uncle Benjamin at his shop just outside Parksley for a year by then, so I spent just as much time as I could working, and went clamming and fishing off the barrier islands when the work ran out. Dad barely acknowledged we were there, which wasn't much of a change. Bo and Lester were twelve; Bo, of course, handled it by punching kids and making trouble, and Lester followed right along with him. Mo was almost fifteen, and it made her go crazy.

We were buddies up till then, just like we'd been when she was two and would scream whenever I went to school. The day Mom died, she went to her room and screamed at the ceiling for a good solid hour. No words, just noise, until her voice was nothing but the squeak of air. That was the last sound she made
for months. We wove around each other for that silent time, like ships in fog, blind and confused.

She started talking again when she went back to school in the fall, and I figured that meant she was better. Then I started noticing the little things, and if I'd been home more, like I should've been, I probably would've noticed it all sooner. She stayed out too late at night, left the house too early in the morning, changed the way she dressed and moved. The thing that bothered me most, though, was that she wouldn't say a word about it to me. She was always “fine,” when I asked, not going anywhere or doing anything or broke out with much to say. Most people would've thought that she was just mellowing out, growing up, calming down. But something wasn't right.

After our whiskey talk she clammed up again, but once I knew what was going on I noticed it when she came home with her skirt all wrinkled, grass stains on her knees, or her makeup half rubbed off. Turns out I worried too much about her getting pregnant, but I had no way of knowing it then. She gave me these sideways looks, knowing I noticed, daring me to make an issue of it or tell Dad, and after a few months I couldn't do it anymore. I threw everything I owned into the bed of the baby-blue Ford pickup I'd fixed myself and drove south until I ran out of land, crossed the bay, and took the first job I could find, in the shipyards in Norfolk. That trip was my last time on the ferry; in April of '67 they finished building the bridge across the bay.

I found a way to be all right with it, in my head. She lived her life and I lived mine and when we saw each other we caught up on things and acted happy, and when she had rough patches I helped her out. But I missed the way we'd been.

It was a day in November '81 that Pony, the foreman that I answered to, came and told me that Mo had called the shipyard looking for me. It had been nine months, maybe a little more, since I'd last seen her, and we hadn't talked much in that time—so of course my first thought was, “Someone's dead.” She'd told him it was a family issue, not life or death, but I needed to come home, and could I haul ass to her place as soon as I got off work? Maybe I'm a bastard, but the call made me relieved in a sick kind of way, not that she needed me but that she'd still look for me when she needed something.

I had the time saved up, so Pony let me finish the bead I was on and take off, not bothering with a shower but stopping for a pack of smokes because you don't ride into battle unarmed.

When I was a kid the ferry was the only way you could get to the mainland from the south end of the island, and the ninety-minute crossing wasn't something you did on a whim unless you were a bit crazy. I loved watching the marshy rim of the island get thinner and thinner and the mainland with all its buildings grow and solidify, and the tankers and the ships and the little sailboats moving in and out of the bay. Going home, at the end of a day of shopping or visiting or reporting to the draft, I used to imagine I was King Arthur going to Avalon, and none of the city mess could follow me. It wasn't just the trip away in reverse. The stink of the city faded and that ribbon of life resolved magically out of the haze on the water. It was all soft and green, and no one could tell me the Shore wasn't the most beautiful place on the face of God's earth.

The bridge is beautiful in its own way, I guess. I've had fourteen
years to get used to it, and when I'm in a hurry I like how it's shaved more than an hour off the travel time. Considering how much easier the trip is now than when I was a kid, I really should visit home more than I do, but it's never been an easy thing for me to take time off. There's not much to go back to, now. Ma's dead, and Dad's rotting with dementia in an old folks' home outside Onancock—he was near forty when I was born, and lived hard ever since. We're not sure where Lester's gotten to, and Bo grew up to be nothing but mean. So there's no one left but Mo. I would have gone back to see her, but her husband Grant is such a prick that I don't really get around to it. He probably feels the same way about me, so having us both in the house would only make things worse for her.

The radio goes all to static halfway across the bridge, then I'm beyond the range of the signal and for a few moments it's silent. Not many people are making the crossing—late afternoon isn't a popular travel time—and I have the road all to myself. The water glints to the horizon and the voice in my head says, “Jump!” because the voice in my head is an asshole like that, and then the radio comes back to life, out of tune, with the afternoon's weather forecast for the islands. The last stretch of the bridge arcs up high, so smaller boats can get under it, and it gives me a good view of Fisherman's Island, where the bridge touches down. It's all swampy and marshy, but that doesn't matter because it's been set aside as a wildlife sanctuary. It doesn't look promising up close, and it makes you wonder what kind of people crossed the bay, hit a marsh, and decided that that was the perfect place to set up camp, way back when pilgrims were doing that sort of thing. My tires hit solid ground, then a few minutes later I smell it: not quite as bad as hogs, but it makes
you want to never face a bowl of chicken soup again. The smell hangs with me for a few miles once I'm past the first chicken plant, and every bit of me knows I'm home.

Norfolk ain't home, though I've been there since I was twenty-one. Growing up I thought I'd never get off the Shore, and the way all us kids talked about how we wanted to go west, see mountains and cowboys and hunt down Reds, only made it worse. At the same time I was in love with the place, with the sand and the sun and the greenness, and the little critters in the creeks and the wild ponies, and didn't ever want to leave it behind.

Once I'm over the bridge it's just one straight shot up to Belle Haven, about eighty or ninety miles, and pretty much the dullest drive I've been on. The land's flat like a pancake, and even though there's water on both sides you can't see it from Route 13, which runs straight up the center of the island like a backbone. There are cornfields and potato fields and tomato fields, and every now and again a house set back from the road near a stand of trees, or a cluster of gravestones, wind-scrubbed and bleached like an old set of teeth left too long on a windowsill. You slow down and speed up as you pass through the little towns, but not by much. They've got names which I now realize are funny sounding, to someone not from here: Assawoman, Modest Town and Helltown, Onancock, Belle Haven, Horsey.

I drove through those towns as a teen, from just before I got a license till just before Ma died, when I thought life was shit because I was bored. Slumped down behind the wheel of the pickup, sucking on the end of a bummed cigarette, burning gas just for the sake of not being at home. Mo used to ride shotgun, feet up on the dash and giving me puppy eyes for a puff of what
she called “our cigarette.” She tagged along everywhere, before she stopped talking to me.

We drove, stopped sometimes to poke around in the little villages—most of them no more than a cluster of cheap one-floor houses around a post office—but more often we'd find the abandoned places, trespass to see what others had left behind. Our favorites were the health spa on the sea side near Wachapreague, where rich people used to come so the women could go sea bathing and the men could shoot our quail and pheasants, because it had only been empty a few years and the buildings were still in good shape; and the village on Assateague Island just below the lighthouse, which was a pain in the ass to get to because you had to go through the village on Chincoteague Island, cross the channel, then hike through the woods, but it had been empty since the thirties and it gave us both the shivers all over to stand in the ruined foundations of what had once been family homes.