The Shore (27 page)

When Seth moved in below me I was still trying to date guys I'd met at school or work. If they didn't leave when they found out on their own what had happened to me, they left when I told them. The ones that weren't around long enough to find out I dumped when they made fun of my neighbors, asked me to score them some psych pills, said that they loved fucking crazy chicks, or did things that reminded me of Bo.

Seth came to introduce himself while I was playing
Resident Evil 2
, and stayed to backseat game until I had to leave for class. When I asked him if the scars down his arms were on purpose or on stupid, he casually told me that his mom had lit him on fire.

I find the Tasley Assisted Living Facility from memory, without having to look at the map. It's prettier than I expected, with a pond and little cottages and apartments for the more independent older people. I don't expect them to let me see Charles Morgan since I'm not related, but the receptionist doesn't seem to care when I tell her that he's my godfather and that I'm there to surprise him; I stopped at the Food Lion to pick up some flowers on the way. She shows me on a paper map of the campus
which cottage he lives in, and I skip off with my visitor's badge like I know who I'm looking for.

No one answers his door, but I'm less nervous now, less off-balance because nobody's shouted at me yet today, so I ask the first person I run into, an older woman stepping slowly from her door down the path to the main building, if she's seen him. She shakes her head, because she couldn't hear me or she doesn't know who he is or both. I wonder if they've got an indoor rec room, if his real goddaughter would know that he sits there and plays pinochle with his friends every day at a quarter past one, but it's sunny and cool and I'm hoping that someone who spent his entire life working construction will be out in it, somewhere private-public where I can talk to him.

There are two men ensconced on a bench, feeding ducks, and when I ask them the blue-shirted one points across the water, to a red motorized wheelchair that's tootling along the asphalt path that rings the pond.

“Chick likes to go for a spin after lunch,” he says. “Used to try to go into Tasley with it, but the deputies kept picking him up.”

When I get close enough to make out his face clearly my stomach knots. He and Mama would have known each other at the right time, and he and I have features in common: dark eyes, and the white of his thick, curly hair makes his tanned skin look even darker. He's still muscular under his clothes, sits bolt upright in the wheelchair; his braced and wasted legs look like they belong to someone else. I wonder, like I have since I found out about blue eyes and brown eyes, if I'll recognize my dad the moment I see him, if I've seen him without recognizing him.

He rolls by me with a nod.

“Mr. Morgan?” I unstick my feet and trot after him. “Are you Mr. Morgan?”

I pop around to face him. He stops now, and it looks like his stomach is knotting in the same way mine just did.

“You knew my mother?”

“If your mother is who I think she was,” he says. “She worked for me. Your dad too.”

I hand him the flowers, for lack of anything better to do.

“I'm sorry for springing up on you of a sudden like this, but I didn't really plan things in advance. They died when I was pretty young, and I want to know more about who they were.”

He's quiet for a minute, thinking back, then starts up his wheelchair again, but slower this time, so I can walk along beside him.

“I didn't know them as well as you'd probably hoped I did,” he says finally, slowly. “I was the foreman, had to keep from getting too friendly with everyone. Felt real awful when all that happened. Of course, didn't hold a candle to how you felt…”

I wave the sympathy away.

“He was loud, and she was quiet. He liked to rag on her, Tiny did too, and she was pretty easy to rile. Had tempers, both of them did. But they were dependable, and even when they were jabbing at each other they kept working. Ellie was a fair electrician too. Never expected them to get married, though.”

“Who's Tiny?”

“He worked with us then, was a friend of your dad's growing up. Tiny recommended him to me. He'd be able to tell you more about your dad as a person, I'd reckon, if that's what you're after. Might be difficult to track down, though.”

“Did they work with anyone else?”

He thinks on that for a moment before he answers, keeps rolling at a pace that is just a bit too slow.

“There was a young kid, apprentice for a while, got good at carpentry so I kept him on after your mother left. Name began with a K…Kyle? Kevin? No, Jacob! Jake Potter. Why did I think it began with a K? After Lovett—our boss—closed up shop he started teaching wood shop at the Combined School on Chincoteague. He really had a thing for your ma, though, back then. Got a few drinks in him and he'd pretty much stare his eyes out at her.”

I get my notebook out of my back pocket. “Could you just tell me again real quick what their names were?”

“Jacob Potter, spelled the normal way, he probably still lives on Chincoteague. Tiny…Didn't keep up with Tiny after I didn't have to no more. He's a Bloxom, if I remember right, but I don't recall his full name.”

I hear a fuzzy sound in my ears that might be all the blood rushing, and I put a hand on the back of the wheelchair, to make the world stop tilting.

“Bloxom?”

“Yep. Lived out near Modest Town, when I knew him. If you take the main road back, when you run out of paving you get to an auto shop. He had the apartment over it. Don't see why he would have moved on, would be worth it to check there.”

My first urge is to chase up this info immediately, but I stay and hear about his grandkids as we slowly circle the pond in a way that reminds me of water circling a drain. I don't leave until he excuses himself to go back to the main building, not for pinochle but a painting class. As I walk back to my car I text Seth,
asking him to look up Jacob Potter on Chincoteague, then head out for Modest Town before I can think about it too much.

I almost turn back when I see it: a tilting wooden building floating in a sea of long grass and derelict cars, out past a welding shop and one of the chicken plants. I haven't missed that smell at all; when I open my car door and step out into it I feel like a little girl again, dirty at the knees, just waiting for the wild dogs to get me.

There are two mechanics, monkeying around under dented cars up on lifts, but they both ignore me. The man at the desk in the office is on the phone, leaning back in the greasy yellow vinyl swivel chair, and he looks right through me when I stand in the open doorway. There's a wooden staircase that goes up to a tiny porch and a solid green door, so I pay them back in kind and go up. It's not really a porch, just enough of a platform to let someone stand safe while they find their keys, but I can see beyond the stunted treetops the green of the marsh, the gold of the barrier islands, and without meaning to I stay there for a bit, tasting the salt edge on the air and trying to see into tomorrow, the way I used to think I could.

I can hear a television humming on the other side of the door, so I knock loud. A moment's wait, then shuffling footsteps, and an interior bolt is drawn back.

He is tall and skinny, so the beer belly that he carries under his dirty undershirt doesn't look like it belongs to his body, like he's smuggling a basketball. His hair's mostly brown still, his eyes darker than Chick Morgan's, skin similarly tan but with a greenish undertone. He smells like booze.

“Well, hello there,” he says.

“Are…are you Tiny?” I can't make myself say his last name.

“Not if the ladies are telling the truth. Did the guys over at Shuckers send you to keep me company tonight?” He puts a hand on my elbow to draw me inside, but I lean back a bit. The porch rail presses against my back.

“No, I came on my own—”

“My reputation precedes me. Come inside, beautiful, we can't have no fun if you stay out here. I'll make you a drink.” He's chuckling, but his voice makes my stomach go cold.

“Sir, I'm not here for that.” I'm not sure I want to be here for my original purpose anymore. I try to remember what it is Jehovah's Witnesses say when they knock on your door on a Saturday afternoon, but I don't think I can even fake that right now. “A friend of yours said that you knew my parents.”

He stops trying to guide me in, but he doesn't take his hand off my arm.

“Did you know Ellie Fitzgerald?”

For a bit he looks at me blank, and even though I don't want him touching it I pull out the picture I have of her. He studies it for a few moments before letting me take it back.

“Don't really remember the face, but I did work with one chick for a while, maybe a few years, back around 1980. Bit of a frigid bitch, if I'm honest. Pretty little tits but never let anyone touch them. Sure about that drink?”

“Just one more question, sir. Did you know her husband at all? Bo Gordy?”

“Bo? Still owes me a tenner. We was friends, for a long while, but after he got married he didn't want me coming around no
more. He were jealous, thought everyone was out to con him out of his woman.”

“Do you know if she was seeing anyone before him?”

“She probably got around a lot, girl like that. Didn't have a boyfriend when I knew her, just liked to show it off and leave 'em hanging. Fair tortured the poor kid we worked with, it was funny as hell. Surprised she didn't get knocked up sooner.”

There are more questions I want to ask, that it sounds like he'd be able to answer, but I pull my arm away and take a few steps down the stairs.

“Thanks for talking to me, sorry if I bothered you.”

“Don't have to be sorry, just come in for that drink and we're square,” he smiles at me. I shake my head at him and smile back even though I don't want to, and walk quick back to my car. I pretend to not see him leering at me as I start it up and turn around in the tall grass.

Sometimes when I can't sleep I think about Cabel Bloxom.

That's not entirely true. A lot of times, for no reason that I can guess, I think about Cabel Bloxom. We knew each other when we were little; I was scared of him because he was bigger and liked to twist my arm behind my back, do things to see if they would make me cry.

Renee told the social worker about how he'd touched her, and when they asked me about it I thought that my number had been called. It was only a matter of time before they figured it out. I answered their questions, told them about finding him doing things to her, about how we hid in the woods a lot when Daddy was smoking up. And then they asked if Daddy
had known that Cabel had touched her, if we'd told him about the threats—and Renee had said yes. She hadn't told him herself, she'd been too scared, so I'd done it alone. He'd told me that we should stay closer to the house, stay out of the woods if we're so scared, but Cabel didn't mean anything by it. But only I knew that; Renee had been hiding downstairs. So when the social worker asked me what my Daddy had said when I told him that a neighbor had threatened to hurt us, I answered, “I'll take care of it, baby.”

They tested our guns, then asked me why my fingerprints were all over the .22. It didn't matter whether they liked it or not that I'd been target shooting, since the .22 didn't kill him, but I'd wiped down the .270 real good, so only Daddy's prints were on it. He'd only been shooting at deer in the yard, but they didn't know that. Our tracks were all through the marsh, mine and Renee's from when we'd hid out, Daddy's from when he'd come to find us or gone hunting a bit, Cabel's from lord knows what. They'd looked at me and looked at Renee and probably hadn't seen anything dangerous there, looked at Cabel and decided that there was no way he'd shot himself in the back of the head with our gun, looked at Daddy and decided that he was the easy answer, and charged him with it.

Maybe they asked Renee, when I wasn't there, if she thought that I could have done it. Probably not in those words, probably they asked if I ever left her alone, if she ever got lonely. And she would have said that I never gave her a moment's privacy, that I was always looking over her shoulder, that we even shared a bed and I took up all the space, forgetting the times that I'd gone to Matthew's and the library on my own, or when she'd wandered away from me while we were in the woods, all the little
moments when I could have done something and she'd have no idea.

They asked us about gunshots, if we'd ever heard any, unexpected, in the woods. And we did, a lot, because deer are vermin, meat is expensive, and people do reckless things when they're hungry. Someone's always letting off a round or two, then pretending they didn't or hiding the evidence before the sheriffs turn up. And they weren't happy about us telling them that wide-scale poaching was just a cultural reality, but telling them something they didn't like wasn't an execution-worthy offense.

When I was a kid I had a lot of daydreams about what would happen if they found out. Sometimes it was a firing squad, sometimes the electric chair, sometimes they'd just leave me to rot in prison, let Renee come down every five years to see me but she'd never say a word, just give me the cold hard glare she did when I'd made her mad and she wasn't talking. For a few years I had a recurring daydream about lethal injections, which got more and more elaborate each time I thought of it. It made me feel sick and scared and prickle behind the eyes and down the throat, but I couldn't stop it, a lot like the sex daydreams I started having when I was older.

Now, though, I think about Cabel himself. What he would have looked like, whether he would have stuck with his girlfriend, if they would have had kids. If having kids would have made him…not nicer, more humane maybe. If he would have hurt those kids. If I was supposed to kill him to keep him from hurting more people. If he would have redeemed himself if I'd let him live.