Marcie
It took her a long time to fall asleep after Flint had shown her the sea turtle’s majestic, prehistoric struggle to lay eggs that probably wouldn’t survive, her crawling progress back to her saltwater home and away from a world not her own. Did the creature know how high the odds were stacked against her, against her offspring? What must that be like—to make a nest anyway . . . to leave it behind, hoping for the best, that somehow one of yours would be the single hatchling to defy the probabilities? Was it simply instinct, a primeval compunction to propagate, or some kind of divine faith?
She wished she could see the eggs hatch. Six to eight weeks, Flint told her—Marcie would be long gone, back to her job and her home and her husband and her life. She’d already gathered her meager things and planned to head home straight from getting her car from the impound lot.
She’d tucked Flint’s daughter’s letters into the nightstand, neatly stacked and tied together again the way they must have been before they’d fallen from the box. Flint had been carrying his daughter’s boxes out of his house, as if he couldn’t bear to share space with her memory anymore, and Marcie didn’t have the right to intrude on that decision, but one day maybe he’d find them here and be glad he still had these pieces of her.
His daughter had died, his wife gone—wasn’t it common that marriages didn’t survive the loss of a child? Hers was floundering and they’d never actually had one. This man had lost everything—more than everything, because whoever Isobel was she’d had a son who also seemed important to Flint and his daughter, and they’d lost that boy too. How did a person recover from that much loss?
Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they just closed in on themselves and shut themselves away, shut everyone and everything else out.
Her restless sleep had her up early, and by the time he came out the next morning in his newly shuffling gait, still wearing that incongruously cheerful bathrobe, she’d already brewed a pot of coffee, filling the kitchen with its rich scent, and was setting breakfast fixings on the counter.
“How do you like your eggs?” she asked.
“This a thing now?”
She lifted one shoulder but otherwise ignored him. She’d learned that dealing with the old man was not unlike handling a cantankerous client at the hotel: just let the current of gripes roll by like the tide till the person felt they’d been heard. Now that she understood him a little more, his ire seemed poignant instead of prickly.
“I’ve already checked on our nest this morning,” she said, leaning down to find a pan under the counter.
He made a noncommittal noise.
“Should we mark it? To make sure no one disturbs the eggs?”
His feet made soft scuffing sounds on the linoleum as he moved toward the adjacent living room, anchoring himself on the upholstered back of his chair. “We don’t need tourists coming up off the beach to gawp. And I sure as hell don’t want people trudging in and out of my backyard to do it.” His words were harsh but his tone was mild, and as she turned to face him she saw that his expression matched it. “How’s the nest?”
“If I hadn’t watched the mama make it I’d never have known it was there, just barely a disturbance in the sand.”
He grunted. “There’s an organization that marks them. Wraps caution tape around stakes to keep people away.”
“Aha. I thought those were crime scenes. Good to know Palmetto Key is rife with turtle nests, not murders.”
She braced for another rant about how depraved and crime ridden the little town was, but he just lowered himself slowly into the chair. She fought the impulse to offer her arm, but winced as pain contracted his face. How was he going to get around on his own like this?
But she knew better than to ask. She held up an egg. “Scrambled okay?”
He gave a single nod. “It’s fine.”
Marcie busied herself cracking several into a bowl, whisking them with a fork.
“We don’t turn the front porch light on this time of year.” His voice broke the silence unexpectedly. “And keep the shades pulled at night to keep the light from spilling out. Otherwise the hatchlings get confused and troop the wrong way.”
“Does everyone do that?” she asked. “All the businesses and hotels too?”
“Most of ’em. Regulations. City finally did something about it when residents complained.”
Marcie suspected that Flint had been one of the most vocal complainants.
“Years ago waves of baby turtles would get crushed on the road by passing cars—they hatched and headed the wrong way because of the lights.” He shook his head. “We once found tides of ’em in one of the hotel pools, floating dead in the chlorine.”
Her ears pricked at his absent mention of “we.” He and his daughter, he must have meant, but she didn’t call attention to it, as if the word were ancient lace that might tear.
Flint offered to drive her to pick up her car when she told him where she was going.
“I can call a cab,” she said, concerned about his back. “You rest.”
“I’m entirely capable of sitting on my ass and pressing a pedal. What, you can offer help but not take it?”
He had a point, and that way she could defer her good-bye a little longer. It surprised her how hard it was to think she’d probably never see the old man again. Maybe she could call him sometimes. Her gaze slipped to the useless rotary phone. Well, maybe she could write.
“Touché,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He settled himself carefully behind the wheel of the old sedan, a pillow he asked Marcie to bring supporting his back, and at first silence reigned—no shock Flint wasn’t exactly a radio kind of guy.
She didn’t mind the long stretches of silence between them—there was something peaceful about it, the freedom to share space with another presence with no expectation to engage. No desire, in Flint’s case—although she registered his tiny overtures for what they were; apparently even the most committed recluse felt the primeval drive for human contact from time to time.
It was so different from what she’d felt with Will since the lima bean—the silences that had grown between them felt freighted with Marcie’s banked rage, resentment . . . and fear. Fear of what might be said, what might be irrevocably damaged if she broke their uneasy détente. With Flint she felt like she could breathe—his indifference to her had the sunny side effect of offering her the freedom to say anything . . . or nothing.
But it was still a house of loneliness, where what she now realized was the pall of loss hung over everything, filled every crevice. The idea of leaving him alone here, in his solitary toad hole, filled her with sadness.
As they came over the bridge that would funnel them onto the mainland, though, to her surprise he was the one who broke the quiet.
“This used to be a swing bridge,” he said. “You know what that is? Swivels out of the way for boats. Stupidly inefficient by modern standards—but a feat of engineering for the time. Something to see when I was a kid.”
“You’ve lived here all your life?” The question was out of her mouth before she remembered she wasn’t supposed to ask any.
But Flint just . . . answered. Like a normal person. “Almost all. Except for three years in the army I’d rather forget.”
Marcie did know better than to pry into that, from the finality of his tone. Instead she gingerly stepped another toe into the territory he did seem willing to let her venture into: “What was it like here then?”
“Fewer people. More mosquitoes.”
Well, he was never going to get hit up by the convention and visitors bureau to be an ambassador for Palmetto Key.
“I’ll bet it was pretty.”
He grunted. “It was all right. Less crap in the river dumping onto our beaches. Less crap on the beach from tourists. More locals, and they took better care of the place. Appreciated what we had.” He shrugged. “Times change.”
“Change isn’t always good,” Marcie agreed, thinking of the lima bean and what it had done to her and Will
She felt Flint’s eyes shift to her, then back to the road as they turned off Beach Boulevard toward town. “Not what I’d expect to hear from our plucky young heroine.”
“I’m not a heroine. Or all that plucky.”
“You got out of a bad situation and looked for a better one,” he said as if it were a compliment. “That takes moxie.”
“It wasn’t a bad situation,” she countered, the urge to defend Will as automatic as breathing. “It isn’t,” she corrected herself. Whatever else was going on between them, her husband was a good man to his core. They just hadn’t wanted the same thing. In any other area that might have been nothing but a blip on the marital radar. It was just with this—a major, irrevocable, life-changing decision one of them had wanted and one of them hadn’t—that their foundation had shifted.
And cracked? Marcie didn’t know.
Flint was looking at her, eyes narrowed. “If it was all candy and cake then what were you doing passed out on the sand?”
“It wasn’t candy and cake,” she said hotly, his tone—and the reminder of her state when he’d found her—irritating her. “It was marriage—it is marriage, like anyone else’s, like any relationship. Good and bad, ups and downs. We just . . . we hit a ‘down’ we didn’t know how to deal with. And I was afraid that if I didn’t get off the road I might run us off it. Okay?”
He didn’t answer, his gaze trained ahead out the windshield, but Marcie refused to feel bad for putting out the same boundaries Flint always used to shut her down. She refused to feel guilty for defending her marriage. Her husband. She looked out the passenger window at the thatches of peeling pink trees flashing by at the side of the road, arms cinched across her torso.
“Yeah. I get that.” His jaw was clenched, his body stiff.
“You okay? Did you bring your pills?”
“My back’s fine.”
They rode the rest of the way without speaking, but the flare of tension between them had dissolved. She wondered whether he was thinking about his lost daughter. Who knew what swam under the surface of any relationship, waiting to pull you down unexpectedly? Marcie never really understood that before the lima bean.
The same clerk was on duty at the impound lot, the guy every bit as disinterested and unhelpful as he’d been last time. Maybe disaffected ennui was a job requirement—or part of the training.
“Driver’s license and registration,” he said in a bored tone, his sleepy eyes barely lifting from his monitor.
“They’re in the car,” Marcie told him again, stacking her cash on the counter.
The man shrugged sloping shoulders, still riveted on his computer screen. “You got other ID? Passport? Birth certificate and utility bill? Car title?”
“I don’t have access to those documents right now—but I have what you asked for in the car.”
“Can’t reclaim the car without ID.”
Flint, who’d insisted on coming inside, stirred beside her, leaning toward the counter as if to bully the bored clerk into compliance. An outburst from a cranky old man wasn’t going to get Marcie her car. She touched Flint’s arm with one hand as if in filial attentiveness, hoping he’d get the message to back off.
Marcie forced an agreeable smile onto her face. “I do have ID. In the car. If you just let me get my purse out of the trunk, I can provide it and I’ll get right out of your hair. I know how busy you must be,” she said, despite the otherwise empty cashier’s area and apparently the most riveting game of computer solitaire imaginable consuming his attention.
“Can you get a certified copy faxed to us? That would do it.”
Flint bent over the counter again, and Marcie pressed an urgent hand to his shoulder, restraining herself from yanking him away by his worn chambray shirt only out of concern for his back. He didn’t resist her, easing off and reaching instead toward his back pocket.
“I think we’re gonna be able to work something out,” Flint said, retrieving a battered brown leather billfold and plopping it to the counter in front of the man. “Is there some sort of convenience fee we could pay so my friend here can just get the identification you need out of the car? On top of the towing and storage charges, of course.”
Marcie’s cheeks heated and she wanted to slap a hand over her face—or Flint’s. Her last embarrassing amateur attempt at bribery had been summarily ignored, and Flint’s Mafia approach was even worse.
But the guy finally tore his gaze away from his monitor, eyeing the open billfold. “Fifty for the convenience fee. Three hundred for the tow and thirty a day for storage. Cash.”
“Perfect.” Flint reached for the wallet again.
Marcie was horrified; she didn’t want him paying for her, and the clerk had brazenly quoted double the towing and storage fees posted on the wall over his head. This was ridiculous—she wasn’t letting this man extort her. She could just call Will and ask him to—
“Tell you what, fella,” Flint added mildly, deliberately folding the billfold and replacing it in his pocket. “Whyn’t you let this lady pay you the posted fees right there”—he pointed to the sign—“and then let her back to the lot to get her purse out of the trunk of her car and show you that ID you’ve got such a hard-on for, and if you do we won’t call the DMV and let ’em know that one of their contractors accepts bribes, inflates charges, and visits porn sites on company time?”
It took Marcie a couple of beats to realize Flint had set the guy up. He hadn’t been trying to intimidate the man—he was looking at his screen.
The clerk bristled and raised himself up. Flint’s eyes hardened and he went utterly still, like a dog about to attack, and for a moment Marcie could see the dangerous, hot-tempered young man he must have been. But the cashier was decades younger than Flint, even if Flint didn’t have a bad back. Her heartbeat tripped as the atmosphere grew charged, but just that fast it dissipated, the clerk glancing at the door behind him as though making sure no one had overheard.
He scowled. “Get your damn purse—if you got keys.”
Marcie smiled and held them up, jingling them merrily as the man stood and led her toward the storage yard.
Flint waited until she retrieved her purse, showed the proper documents, and paid the clerk—the posted amount—before walking her back out to her car.
“Gotta speak up for yourself, girl,” he said as she opened the driver door. “No one’s going to do it for you.”
“You did.”
She meant it teasingly, as a sort of thank-you—an indirect one she thought was the only kind Flint might accept—but he scowled.
“Well, you can’t count on me,” he growled. “Or anyone.”
He sounded like her mother, who’d made similar comments not quite sotto voce every time she was with Marcie and Will, even as years passed and rendered her warnings ridiculous. Until Marcie finally stopped inviting her over, choosing instead to go visit her mother alone. She wouldn’t keep putting Will through that, not when he’d never done anything to deserve it. Not when, despite her mom’s dire predictions, Will had never let her down.
Oh, no? Hasn’t he? Jeanetta Jones’s snide tone wormed into her head, insinuating doubts she’d never succumbed to when her mother was alive.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
“That sounds lonely,” Marcie said to Flint, ignoring her mother’s imagined voice the same way she’d ignored Jeanetta’s supercilious comments in life. “I can’t imagine living like that—believing you can’t rely on anyone. That we’re really that alone.”
Flint snorted. “Don’t be so damned naïve, girl. We’re born alone and we die alone, and there’s no one you can count on but yourself, no matter what anyone else says.” And he walked away, back to his car.
Was it losing his little girl that had made him believe something so bleak? Was it an accident, maybe one caused by Flint’s negligence? Something like that might have happened to anyone, but no rationalization would ever allow a parent, a husband, to get over being responsible for the death of a child.
She should follow him, she thought. Let him know she was headed back home, would be out of his hair—to take care of himself. Give him her cell number just in case the man decided to join the twenty-first century and get himself a working phone.
But his comments stung. What did the bitter old man know, balled up in his dark little toad hole, pushing away everyone and everything? He’d figure out she wasn’t coming back when she didn’t come back. Probably be relieved.
Her cell phone was dead in her purse—no surprise after all this time—and she retrieved her car charger from the console, plugged it in. How many messages and voice mails might she find? Hard to imagine she’d only been offline for a few days; it felt like she’d been in Palmetto Key much longer, time taking on that drawn-out beach feeling, as if oozing in sap.
Flint pulled out ahead of her and she followed his car out onto the street, back the way they’d come. She could call Will once the phone caught enough juice to turn on, let him know she was okay, that she’d be home soon.
She reached the T junction where Flint’s long, squat sedan sat with his blinker on. She watched him make the left turn, inching forward as the cars ahead of her did the same.
Would he even notice her absence? Would Darla or any of the regulars remember her, the woman who left their lives as suddenly as she’d dropped into it? Marcie doubted it. It wouldn’t be long before the placid surface of life in Palmetto Key closed back over the area she’d momentarily displaced, the brief time she’d been there lost in the little town’s amorphous past.
She took her foot off the brake and turned right toward the highway.