Virgin Territory (12 page)

I’m lying in bed now, wondering who decided to make the ceilings of suburban homes look like cottage cheese. Someone must have thought of it. Was it an aesthetic choice, or did a contractor find a way of saving money with his revolutionary technique? Maybe the guy was lying in bed, unable to sleep, staring up at his ceiling, when the idea popped into his head.
With my revolutionary new technique
, he thought,
I will not only be able to save money but also give people something interesting to stare at when they can’t sleep
. Maybe this had been his mission in life and he had devoted himself to it entirely. His plan. Sad that nobody remembers him or knows his name. Like Pluto, he’s been downgraded, and turned into a number, one step away from having no identity at all.

There’s a sign on the front gates of the club that reads:
PARDON OUR APPEARANCE. CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS
. Apparently, Felder is so fed up with the whole business that he’s had the sign posted before taking off to Boca.

“We’re on our own,” Chad tells me. He’s gotten it together and is selling bottled water out of a large, red, banged-up cooler. His fistful of dollars is all the evidence I need to convince myself that he’s doing all right and turning a profit. Okay, so maybe he isn’t as dumb as he looks. But then he opens the top of his cooler and shows me a secret stash of plastic sandwich bags into which he’s stuffed a handful of the bark from a tree. Each one has a sticker on it announcing that it will cost you twenty dollars.

“I’ve already sold five of them,” he tells me, proudly holding up one of the bags so I can give it a quick inspection. When I reach out to grab it, he pulls the thing away from me. “Twenty bucks. It’s the bark from the tree that the Virgin Mary appeared
on. Like selling candy to babies. I tell everybody it’s got healing properties. But even as a collector’s item, it’s worth it. You can sell it on eBay for, like, twice the price.”

Chad is just one of the many vendors who has gathered on the lawn in front of the clubhouse. Hot dogs, souvlaki, T-shirts, hats, holy water, and various items that come with a supernatural promise are all on sale. The area is packed with people on the make as well as plenty of folks who are lined up to buy the stuff. The parking lot across the street is heaving with activity—cars, RVs, SUVs, Porta-Potties, and hulking trucks with satellite hookups for the local TV camera crews that are vying for the available coverage. Seems as though the whole world has arrived in Jupiter to witness the alleged miracle that’s happening at the Spring Hill Golf Club.

There’s a rumor going around that the gates will open at noon, and everyone will finally get a chance to view the tree. And though no one can confirm the news, there’s enough excitement in the air to convince the crowd that it’s a done deal. After weeks of deferred gratification, the faithful are eager to believe that their prayers have at last been answered.

But there’s a bigger surprise waiting for me over by the refreshment tent. Doug is standing next to a large woman who is balancing herself on crutches; she’s wearing a print top and plaid sneakers, and her face reminds me of a piece of paper that had been balled up and then uncrinkled so that it could
be read one last time. Doug has his camera hoisted onto his shoulder, and he’s just finishing up an interview with her.

“What’re you doing here?” I ask him as the woman finally hobbles away. “You’re supposed to be at work.”

“I know, but how could I turn this down? It’s an opportunity of a lifetime. I even got a new camera!”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No,” he says, sweating bullets and surveying the crowd in search of his next victim. “I think maybe I could win an Academy Award. In the documentary category. A film about what’s going on here. I mean, look around.”

I look around. There’s an old guy offering glow-in-the-dark rosary beads from the stash that hangs around his neck (five dollars a pop). There’s a little girl dressed like an angel, and she’s annoying everyone by jumping from one picnic blanket to the next. “Stop it this instant,” a woman calls out to her; but she just keeps jumping. There are also plenty of just-folks wearing T-shirts that read:
MARY WAS HERE
. Many people look as though they could use a miracle. When I ask Doug if taking time off from work is such a smart move, considering the odds are against his actually winning an Oscar, he explains that he’s no longer satisfied just being an underpaid landscape technician, and the time has come for him to revive his career as a videographer, at least part-time. He’s sick, he says, of putting everything on hold and waiting for his life to begin. And besides, he claims that he can make real money
supplying the national affiliates with “killer footage” when the story breaks.

“This is crazy!”
I scream at him as he takes off after a husband and wife wearing matching Virgin Mary baseball caps.

“So what?” he yells over his shoulder. “I’m tired of hauling dirt. Can’t a guy have some fun?”

I go and find Angela, who is sitting on a floral-print percale sheet that she’s spread out in the shade; it’s not much of a clubhouse, but it qualifies as a meeting place for the Virgin Club on a sweltering Friday morning in August.

“My dad’s a total nutcase,” I murmur to Angela.

She’s slowly peeling away the thin skin of a green grape. Her skin is tanned and taut, her hair is still damp from her morning shower, and the herbal scent of her shampoo is wafting toward me. She’s pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail that swings as she turns her head from one side to the other.

“Still,” she says to me, popping the grape into her mouth, “you have to admire his get-up-and-go. No?”

“I don’t know. At a certain point, too much get-up-and-go just seems kind of tragic. It’s like he’s trying to revive some past glory as the video hotshot of the nineties.”

“Or maybe he’s trying to pick up where he left off.”

“Also tragic.”

She gazes off into the crowd, and then very gently she places her cluster of grapes on the sheet, turns to me, and says, “Some people just have more get-up-and-go than others. Take me, for
instance. Just the way I am. More interested in places where I’m not than in the place where I am. My dad’s the same way. Maybe it’s in our blood.”

“Where’s your dad now?” I ask.

She bites her lip and then squints into the hazy distance, as though the guy might suddenly appear. “He had things he needed to do with his life. But he’s coming for me one of these days.”

She tilts her head sideways and looks at me with a sad and almost pitying expression.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says as she toes the grass with the tip of her sandal. “Just wondering why you’re so angry with your father. What’s he done that’s so bad?”

“For one thing, he forced me to move here to Florida.”

“Oh, that,” she says, popping another grape. “But if you hadn’t moved here, you never would’ve met me.”

She leans in and gently lands a kiss on my unsuspecting cheek. My face flushes, and I’m sure I’ve turned as red as a Twizzler—not from embarrassment but because all the blood in my body wants to be closer to the place where her lips have just touched me.

“How about we break into another house tomorrow?” she suggests. She’s applying a fresh coat of gloss to her lips—strawberry. I watch her smooth on the creamy red stuff and then smack her lips together. She says, “I bet you know a ton of trouble we could get into in this town.”

I realize that she’s mistaken me for someone else. She thinks I’m some tough guy who breaks into houses and gets into a ton of trouble when no one’s looking. She’s thinking of Alex, a guy she’s invented in her head. She hardly even knows Dylan; I wonder if she ever will.

“How about it?” she asks. “Fun, right?”

I try to move my tongue, but it just sits there like a big fat slug going nowhere. Finally, my mouth gets it together.

“Yeah, fun.”

We don’t waste any time. We break into our first house later that afternoon. Truth is, breaking into houses is a piece of cake in Jupiter, because the back doors are either left unlocked or there’s a key hidden under a
WELCOME
mat, a planter, a rock. It doesn’t take a genius to sniff out the houses where the dogs don’t bark, and to avoid the police, who are never around anyway.

It’s day three, and we’re up to two houses a day. I’m in charge of choosing which house we’re going to target because everyone still mistakenly believes that, as a resident of this town, I know something about the lay of the land. Another case of mistaken identity. I go with it. I’m trouble.

Once we make it inside the chosen house, we’re careful not to disturb anything or leave a trace behind; but then after five or six houses, we begin to experiment by repositioning a knick-knack on the mantel, rearranging the fake flowers in the hall, reading their opened mail, and putting the kitty litter box in the kid’s room. We make subtle changes in the decor, redrape the
curtains, adjust the furniture, turn all the spines of the books backward. We make touches that will give the people who live there a reason to pause and say,
“Hey, wait a minute,”
but not major enough to cause them worry. Jennifer Galloway will come home from day camp to find that her ceramic horses have all been turned around to face the wall.
“That’s weird,”
she’ll say to herself. Carmen D’Allessandro will stop in the middle of her living room and wonder why there are tiny squared impressions in her carpet, and when did the sofa shift.
“Did you move the sofa?”
she’ll ask her husband.

We’ve been in and out of nine houses now without being spotted or getting caught. We begin to take bigger risks. We all sign someone’s yearbook:
Best of Luck!
We polish the family silver. We give the dog a bath. We do certain chores that have been neglected by the householders for way too long, and, as a result, we feel important, needed. Under normal circumstances, we might’ve been thanked, even paid for doing so many good deeds and taking such initiative. If, for instance, we’d done any one of these things in our own homes, we would’ve been hailed as heroes and maybe even received a raise in our allowance, but we don’t want praise or even acknowledgment. What we’re after is the kick of thinking how the people will react when they notice that their newspapers have been bundled and stacked in a tidy pile by the garage door. We’re elves—do-gooders who can’t be trusted not to make mischief.

We’re visiting a modest mint-green bungalow on Sweet
Bay Circle; it has a screened-in porch and is situated on a fully fenced corner lot set back from passing traffic. The house smells like it’s been professionally freshened.

“Hey, you guys!” Angela calls to us from an upstairs bedroom. “Come see what I found!”

Crispy, Des, and I run up the stairs and find Angela sitting cross-legged on the plush carpet in the guest bedroom. She’s been busy organizing the clothes closet, and all the contents, including a stack of board games, have been pulled out onto the floor for our inspection.

“It’s a Ouija board,” Angela says, holding up the box as evidence. “Want to give it a spin?”

Crispy and I fall to the floor and take our positions. But for some reason, Des is holding back.

“Des?” I say.

“I don’t know,” she replies. “Don’t seem right to me at all.”

I had an experience with a Ouija board when I was in fourth grade, but that was ages ago when I didn’t know a single dead person. I went to Heather Tamlyn’s house and she and I sat huddled in her bedroom, gaping at the board, our fingers lightly touching the glider. We hoped against hope for a sign, an utterance, some form of communication from the Great Beyond. Something. At that age, the occult represented the limits to which we were able to go without actually having to leave the house. We didn’t go very far; the only thing that came from that early experiment was the unintelligible mutterings of someone
named Cookie who may or may not have been alive once upon a time. And yet despite that earlier disappointment, here I am placing my fingertips on the glider once again and putting my faith in a game.

“Who’s pushing it?” I ask the first time the glider goes careening across the glossy board.

“Shhh,” Crispy tells me. And then slowly, very slowly, the glider begins to inch along.

“Well, one of us is pushing it,” Angela says with dead certainty. And then with less certainty, she asks, “Is someone pushing this thing?”

“No,” was where the glider stopped, the answer at the upper-right-hand corner of the board. But wait. The glider is on the move again, spelling out a message.
N
. Then
O
. Then a brief pause followed by a few more letters:
B. O. D. Y
. No body.

“Funny,” Crispy says. “A dead person hasn’t got a body. Get it?”

“Hysterical,” I say with all the irony I can muster.

To be honest, I’m not that comfortable with the idea of having a dead person communicate with us and make jokes. I lift my fingers from the glider and say, “I think we should stop. This is creeping me out.”

“It’s not right,” Desirée agrees. “You guys ought to stop.”

Angela looks at me, her eyes gleaming through a thick hang of hair. I may be imagining it, but I think I see the glint of a dare in her eye. Then she smiles and says, “Don’t worry. Like the board said: Nobody’s there.”

I accept her dare and gently place my fingers back on the glider. I tell myself that Crispy is doing the gliding and the spelling. Or Angela. And so I’m able to go along with the game. Immediately, the glider begins to make crazy circles as though it’s taking me for a wild little test drive.

“This is crazy,” Desirée declares, trying to make it sound as though she isn’t frightened. But she has grabbed a pencil and pad from the desk there in the guest room, and she begins to write down the letters as they are indicated one by one on the board.

“What’s your name?” Angela asks.

There’s a pause, and then the glider spells out:
Call me Mom
.

A chill shoots up my spine and spreads to my limbs, then to my fingertips, and then finally to the small hairs on the back of my neck.