7

Saturday, midday

He drives them down the island to a small restaurant called The Whale Head, where they find a table next to a large window that looks out over a boat dock in the sound. The boats rock and yank their dock lines. Halyards clack in the wind.

The waitress is a stout, middle-aged Black woman with a pixie haircut. Her hands and wrists move with quick certainty. The soft features of her face seem permanently fixed in a smile, but there is a hint of watchful concern in the way her eyebrows crinkle when she speaks and the way she holds her hands at her waist, one resting in the cup of the other, when she talks with customers. Ace recognizes her as someone he has seen in the restaurant before, but not as a waitress. Then, she seemed to be running the place.

“I’m Faye-Marie,” she says as she passes out menus. “How’re y’all?”

“We’re fine,” Ace says. “Aren’t you the owner of this place?”

“Half owner with my sister, Donna. I’m helping wait today because we’re short.”

“Well, good to see you,” Ace says. “I’m Ace Sinclair and this is J’nelle Reade. How are you doing?”

“I’m still here,” she says, “on God’s good earth, and that’s saying a lot.”

“Amen to that,” Ace says.

“Yes,” J’nelle says. “Double amen.”

Faye-Marie pours them water, then uses the hem of her apron to wipe a spot the cleaning rag missed from the edge of the table. They order quickly, as the lunch menu is small.

“Y’all be good. I’ll be back with your wine,” she says.

J’nelle begins to talk slowly and deliberately in what strikes Ace as an effort to provide a counterweight to the hardship she talked about over breakfast. She talks about her life: first the Peace Corps, where she taught first aid and public sanitation in the mountains of Ecuador and Peru; then grad school; followed by work for the State Department on education projects in Kenya and Botswana; and finally, after Seth vanished, as a sort of globe-trotting problem-solver in, as she puts it, “the service of American capitalism.” She pauses only to say, “Thanks,” as she takes the wine from Faye-Marie before she can set it down.

Once again—that fine-tuned brain and hyper-active memory. Ace listens at first and then lets the words flow over and around him.

“At least in those jobs,” she says, “I was well paid.”

“Is that why you went to Paris in September,” he says, “on one of those jobs?”

“To wind one up,” she says, “but mostly because I love Paris. Almost all my work now is pro-bono work for refugees.”

“In the U.S.?”

“All over.”

And suddenly, it’s as if the student council president of old has pulled up a chair to the table. The food arrives; J’nelle doesn’t notice. She launches into the horrors of worldwide immigration policy, the suffering she witnessed of malnourished children in Africa, the brutality of dictatorships, oppression of women everywhere, and Americans’ lackadaisical attitude toward it all. He nods—“Uh huh … Really … Yeah … No doubt.” She glances out the window as she spits out the words. “Cruel … stupid … racist … self-defeating … un-Christian.” It continues through lunch and two glasses of wine for her, one for him. When she finally bangs a fist on the table, he taps on her wine glass with a spoon.

“I thought we were staying in the moment.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I let this get to me, but it does.”

“Perhaps it hits close to home.”

“Maybe so.”

She turns at last to her food amid the soft clinks of silverware and the murmur of conversations at other tables and picks about the edges of her salad. It is like watching a bird drink water. At last, she raises her wine glass, lets it dangle between her thumb and fingers, and looks at him. He feels a sudden urge to grab hold of something.

“Do you believe in God?” she asks.

“No.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“So, why did you ask?”

She starts to take a drink, then sets the wine glass down and turns to look out the window at the small harbor as if some hint of what she is searching for is out there among the swaying hulls and riggings.

“I guess I was hoping you did,” she says.

“Do you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Does this have something to do with our being seventy-five?” he says.

“Seventy-six.”

“OK, seventy-five for me, seventy-six for you—both of us cresting the last wave of middle age.”

“Probably, but I’ve asked myself that question most of my life.”

She takes a sip of wine and once again dangles the glass, swinging it pendulum-like back and forth, then turns back to the view out the window.

“Do you remember that Christmas Eve after the candlelight service at Saint Michael’s when we were making out in your car and the cops showed up?”

“I remember we did a lot of making out,” he says. “The dates and locations are not so clear. My mind was usually focused elsewhere.”

He expects at least a smile, an acknowledgment of humor, but when she turns to him, her gaze goes deep into the windows of his eyes.

“It began with us going parking on that shadowy street in Old Town where somebody had broken the streetlamp with a rock or something. It was around midnight, and the cops pulled up beside us with their red light flashing and got out and shined their flashlights all over us and the car before I could get your letter sweater pulled back over my unbuttoned blouse. They demanded our names, and then one of them, a short, square looking guy named Reggie or something, with no neck and not much older than we were, puffed up like a bantam rooster and launched into a sermon about the sins of the flesh and how the devil was sitting there on the dashboard with his pitchfork and dangling tail, watching us and grinning. Do you remember that?”

“Vaguely. I remember looking down at the keys dangling from the ignition and praying you wouldn’t say something back.”

“He went on and on,” she says, “about coveting each other and ‘knowing’ each other in a sinful way, especially forbidden touching. ‘Dirty fingers,’ he called it. A creepy feeling came over me that he was relishing the lustful details.”

“I do recall that he seemed a little weird,” Ace says, “and that at some point you muttered something like idiot and retard under your breath and I started trying to humor him and get it over with.”

“Yes, he was weird,” she says, “and he got even weirder, remember? He asked our ages, and I said seventeen and you said sixteen. He shined his flashlight in my face and said something like, ‘Seventeen, huh! I got a sister who’s seventeen, and you look a lot older than that to me.’ And then he shined his flashlight all over me like I was a snake or something, and shined it on you and asked if your parents knew you were out with an older woman—he actually used that term—and told you how it was dangerous for your soul and could lead to everlasting damnation. We would both burn in the hottest part of Hell.”

Her face is flushed and tense in that way it used to get in high school when something upset her. She is back there now, he thinks, at the hot center of that cold Christmas Eve night. Her fingers fidget around the base of her wine glass as it sits on the table.

“I guess I didn’t remember the flashlight assault,” he says. “It sounds awful.”

“It was awful.”

“They finally left though, right? And we moved on.”

“No,” she says. “His partner rolled his eyes and walked back to their squad car and opened the door and said, ‘Come on Reggie, let’s go.’ But Reggie stood there and kept shining that flashlight on us but mostly on me until I slid down in the seat to get it off me. His chest heaved and his breathing got deeper and faster, and I realized he was sure we’d been having sex, and it turned him on, and that his sermon had really been about him and his own wicked thoughts. He had twisted religion and the Bible into some sort of mental self-abuse.”

She takes an unconscious sip of wine, sets the glass down, and looks at him. The flush is gone, and a cryptic smile tugs at those tightly pressed lips. When he saw that smile in high school, he could never be sure what it meant, except that he knew it wasn’t joy or amusement. Disgust maybe. But a slight quiver in it now tells him it means even more than that.

“J’nelle, I’m really sorry that happened, truly. I don’t remember it nearly as well as you do, and I can see why it stayed with you. But if it’s so unpleasant, why bring it up?”

“Do you remember what happened next?”

“I remember the other cop saying something like, ‘That’s enough, Reggie,’ and taking his arm and dragging him back to their squad car, and they began to jaw at each other, and we drove away.”

“Yes. They finally let us go, and you drove away with that red light still flashing through the rear window of the car. It was like it was following us, following me. And with every blink of it came a huge flash of shame, and then anger so that I began to shake. That creep! What right did he have? And you put your hand on mine, and I took it and squeezed it, and it was like you were pulling me out of the hell he had cast me into with his wandering flashlight and dirty little mind.”

Ace was never aware he had had that kind of effect on her, ever: rescuer, source of comfort by the mere touch of his hand.

“I did that?” he says.

Her smile is gone now. There is a new eagerness in her eyes.

“Yes, you did. And it rescued me from the burn that flashlight had left on me. It took me back to all the good things we had before Reggie came along with his stupid sermon and heavy breathing: my belief in God, St. Michael’s and Reverend Epps and his civil rights work and all the youth group stuff we did together—in fact everything we did together, including all the lovey-dovey and making out. And there we were, alone once again in your car, silently moving through the quiet streets. It felt like a refuge, it felt so warm and close.”

He can almost feel the breathy warmth of the car’s dark interior as it carried them through the Christmas Eve night, hear the tinny rattle of the fan in the car’s foot heater, smell the butt-slick vinyl seats. Yes, so warm and close, and yet he had had no idea what was going on in the head of the girl next to him with her fingers wrapped in his, though he must have seen and heard everything she did, everything this older J’nelle has just described: the fire-breathing sermon; the wandering flashlight beam; the heaving, uniformed chest; the red light from the cop car flashing in his rearview mirror as he drove away. Had he ever seen what was in her head? And how about her feelings, like the ones she just shared from that night? Did he ever have a clue?

He unlocks his fingers from their grip on the seat of his chair and interlaces them before him on the table in as relaxed a manner as possible, then looks up at her waiting eyes and clears his throat.

“And I kind of just sat there.”

“Well yes, but what else could you do?”

“No. I mean afterward, when we were driving away. After it was over.”

Once again her gaze drifts out the window.

“Things really are a blur for you,” she says.

“Does that upset you?”

“A little.”

He waits for her to turn back to him. When she doesn’t, he says:

“Was this the night of the cemetery? I remember once we wound up there very late.”

“Yes,” she says. She’s looking at him now. “We passed back by St. Michael’s, where we’d just been to the candlelight service and where not more than an hour before I had been so caught up in that starry-eyed vision of us and God and the church, and it seemed as if we’d come full circle. We’d come back to something that was even more than it was before. I moved across the seat and pressed very close, and I think it was at that moment I began to understand for the first time what being in love might mean.”

Yes, he thinks, that’s it. It was there in that moment and a few others like it. And that’s what his dream of the red-winged blackbirds is about, the bright flashes of black, red, and yellow, rising from the marsh. And then they are gone, leaving an emptiness behind them that is a palpable expression of the deepest tenderness. A tenseness that has built in him gives and releases a tidal pool of warmth that flows all over him.

“We were in Old Town by then,” he says. “St. Michael’s was on the edge of it.”

“Yes,” she says, “we came to the Old Town Cemetery, and the gates were open, and I caressed your thigh and said let’s go in there. Before that evening I would never have done that, never have been the one to make the overture. It just happened.”

He remembers now the slow, nimble movement of her hand onto his leg, leading him deftly onward to wherever she was taking them. From that moment, everything seemed perfectly timed. He relaxed his grip on the steering wheel and let his wrist drape over the hard hoop of plastic, James Dean style, tapped his worn brakes, down-shifted—third, second, first—felt the wheel’s smooth turn as the car’s bald tires veered into the graveyard driveway.

“I’ve often wondered,” she says, “whether you had any idea what was going on in my mind then.”

“I knew,” he says, “we were not turning into the cemetery to pay our respects to the dead.”

She turns again to look out the window. It’s as if she’s stepped from the restaurant and gone to walk among the rocking boats.

“It was to pay respects to life—or at least to life as I saw it and hoped it would be.”

She folds her hands before her on the table and begins to twirl her thumbs. He watches them go round and round, stifles the twitch in his thumbs to do the same.

She glances up at him. “A teenage dream,” she says, “huh?”

“Yes,” he says, “I guess. But whatever it was, it went very deep. That night it was real, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she says, “it was.”

She locks her gaze on him, then drops it to her slowly twirling thumbs. He thinks of a reel winding something in.

“As I recall,” she says, “it began with our usual heavy make out in the back seat, but the usual wasn’t going to be enough for that night, not for the way I was feeling. And the back seat wasn’t either. So I stripped off everything under my dress and took your hand and led you off into the cemetery. It was Christmas Eve, for God’s sake, and I was practically naked and barefoot as if I was going to my own infant baptism rather than to get myself deflowered. And we came to this tall obelisk stone with the name Alton Zebulon Fitts on it in fancy script—you remember that? I’ll never forget it, he’d been mayor or governor or something—and I knelt on the grave and pulled you down to me.”

“I don’t remember Zebulon,” Ace says, “but I remember that. It was like being drawn into a solemn rite.”

The details of the scene come back to him like a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces don’t quite fit. But he can feel the intensity of the scene build around him now, as it did then, when she pulled him slowly and surely into the timeless hollow of that evening. Usually in their making out, he was the initiator and the leader-on. But that evening it was different, very different.

He starts to twirl his own thumbs and feels the arthritic knuckles bump and hang on each other. What unfolded between them was so much more than he had ever imagined: not just the sudden eagerness in her body, its new insistence, it was the way it happened once it began, the lightning fast, achingly slow ease of it, the way every movement slid easily into the next as his hesitation folded and skittishness melted away.

He lifts his eyes from his twirling thumbs and risks a quick glance.

A blush has deepened along the ridges of her cheeks and adds a new luster to her eyes, which seem to glow from the darkness around Alton Zebulon Fitts’s grave. A memory returns—the feeling of her body under him on the frozen winter earth. Her body felt harder and stronger than usual and lit with energy, yet more tender and yielding. It came at him and faded at the same time.

“Jesus, J’nelle,” he says. “This is not fair.”

Her thumbs stop twirling and slowly his do too, and he feels the twitch that has been working in the muscle between the base of his thumb and knuckle of his index finger.

It’s all quite clear now. The blur of their times together is no longer a blur. This night was the night that decided it all, whatever was going to happen with them. This was the night. Surely, some part of him knew that, somewhere under all the lust and longing and fumbling of hands. Surely, and yet…

“I remember it being very cold,” he says, “even for December.”

“Yes, it was cold! As you may recall, I was on the bottom.”

“And I was probably a bit fumbling and awkward.”

A slight smile. “I would agree with that.”

“And as I recall, we were almost there, most of the way home, and who stopped it?”

“It wasn’t me,” she says.

Her eyes are still on him, or maybe on that boy in the graveyard.

“I guess,” he says, “the altar boy stepped forth. He got in the way a lot back then.”

“I didn’t see him,” she says. “I saw a cautious boy who didn’t want to get his girlfriend pregnant.”

Was that it—careful Ace, considerate Ace, wise, prudent Ace? Or was he afraid of taking a step beyond that easy, trance-like world he knew—afraid of her sudden, wild insistence, of where it might lead, of everything?

He looks down at his lifeless hands, resting on the table, waiting for the next current to hit from a Pearlman Shake.

“So when that happened,” he says, “when I balked at the starting gate, how did you feel?”

“Disappointed, I guess. Probably a little relieved, and…”

“What?”

“Deflated.”

“Deflated?”

“Yes. The whole unity thing: us and our happy-ever-after future, my starry-eyed vision of the Divine, and how it would all come together in some magical never-never land. I think that’s when I really began to question that vision. My beliefs had been so strong, but so were those of a lot of people, even a pervert like Reggie. And my ideas of God and sex seemed about as confused as his. Once you start to ask those questions at that age, it leads to one end.”

“Sorry,” he says. “I guess I should have screwed your brains out.”

“Ha!” she says. “Or vice versa. But it doesn’t really matter. That awakening would have happened sooner or later anyway, probably sooner. I was tired of being trapped in my own head.”

“Yeah, I guess it would have,” he says. “It does for most thinking people.”

“That’s a tragedy isn’t it?” she says.

“Is it?”

“It didn’t seem like it then, but now, I don’t know.”

Her eyes stay on him as he glances up at her and then looks about to catch Faye-Marie’s eye and ask for the check.

“I’m getting this,” J’nelle says, and reaches into her jeans for her card.

“Not on your life,” he says, repeating her phrase from when she rejected his offer of air fare. When Faye-Marie comes with the check, he holds out his credit card without examining the bill.

“You’re mighty trusting,” Faye-Marie says.

“You look as trustworthy as anyone I’ve ever met,” Ace says.

“That’s nice of you to say,” she says. “But be careful. There are plenty of folks on this island that aren’t. It didn’t used to be that way, but since the drugs came in, a lot has changed.”

The image of the young mother’s face in the grocery store flashes in his mind, the one he gave the water to: wasted, graying skin; cornered eyes.

Faye-Marie gives him a pat on the hand and turns toward the checkout station.

“I like her,” says J’nelle. “She reminds me of Mrs. Beacham, our old algebra teacher. Remember her?”

“I remember she gave me a C and chewed me out over it.”

J’nelle’s fingers are spread wide on the table, and it occurs to him for the first time that the silver band around her finger, the one that looks like the work of an amateur silversmith who was into Celtic art, is probably her wedding band. How could he have missed that? He’s been looking at those remarkable fingers ever since she arrived.

Faye-Marie drops the check folder with his card on the table.

“Are y’all going to leave before the hurricane?”

“Probably tomorrow morning,” he says.

“A lot of folks have already left. That’s why we have such a small crowd today.”

“Yes,” Ace says. “I’ve been noticing it’s kind of sparse.”

Faye-Marie glances from him to J’nelle and back as if she’s arrived at a judgment about whether they can be trusted with insider information.

“I’m not sure it’s going to hit.”

“Why’s that?”

“My uncle, Ike Haskell, is the pastor over at the A.M.E. Zion Church on Ocean Drive.” She pauses, a slight twinkle of mirth. “He calls it the Lifeboat Holiness Church, but he takes that sign down when the bishop comes. Anyway, Ike was born and raised here. He’s been watching hurricanes all his life, and his prediction is that this one’s going north of us, up the coast. He predicted the last two they warned us about weren’t going to hit, and he was right. And the one before that, he said it was going to hit, and it did. Wiped out that old marina down at the point, bunch of those overbuilt homes along the beach. Cut a new inlet below Mayok Woods. So for right now, I’m relying on Uncle Ike. But if it hits, well, I’ll probably stay anyway. Lots to do here. Folks are going to need help.”

Ace scans the Visa receipt, adds a generous tip and gives it back to her.

“Thanks,” he says. “Your uncle sounds like a smart man.”

“He listens to the Lord,” Faye-Marie says. She takes the signed check and gathers up their plates.

“Y’all take care now,” she says, “and stay safe.” Then over her shoulder as she walks away: “And may you be blessed.”

“Thank you,” Ace and J’nelle say in unison.

When Faye-Marie is out of hearing, Ace says, “I’ve kinda overlooked that part of it.”

“You mean, the folks who won’t leave, or can’t, the ones she’s staying to help?”

“Yes.”

“I guess when you’ve got roots here and family and have made a life here, it’s harder to leave.”

“When it’s your home,” Ace says, “leaving is kind of like dying.”

She gives him a quick glance. Her lips part to speak, but she presses them together instead, then presses them harder and drops her eyes.

He gives her a tap on the wrist.

“Back to your questions on God and lost faith: have you tried going to church?”

“Yes. What I’m looking for is not there—at least, I can’t find it.”

“Meditation? Spiritual retreats in the Arizona desert? Pilgrimages to holy sites? Buying a Labrador retriever?”

“I’ve tried all except the Lab. The closest I came was about six months ago on a trip to South Africa. I got invited to a Zulu wedding celebration. It was outdoors, after the quieter rituals of stepping over the broom and exchange of vows were observed. People were dressed in bright-colored dashikis, turbans, flowing gowns, even animal skins for the groom and a few dignitaries. There was lots of ritual dancing, much of it acting out the coming together of two souls in matrimony. It seemed chaotic at first, then it began to sway to its own rhythm, and the rhythm fused a community that seemed to melt into one being.”

She pauses and gives her head a slight shake of embarrassment.

“Seems new agey, I know, but I’m not sure quite how else to say it. Anyway, it pulled me in, not to the dancing—I was on the periphery of the ceremony as part of a circle of guests—but emotionally. It was moving in a joyful, gathering-in sort of way. I felt—again, I don’t know how else to say it—a connectedness with the dancing and singing people, with the whole scene. It stirred up a deep spiritual longing.”

Her eyes take on a gleam of excitement. She focuses them on the reflection the window makes in the inch of white wine remaining in her glass.

“I assumed it would soon fade away,” she says, “but it hasn’t. And now I understand that it’s been there all along. It’s a part of me that I forgot about while I was running all over the world trying to save everything. To make up for not being able to save those dearest to me.” She glances up at him. “Hence my question about your belief in God.”

“Sorry I wasn’t a better help.”

“It was an unfair question. I’m just floundering about. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for.”

“I’m guessing there aren’t many Zulu marriage celebrations around your neighborhood in New York.”

“No.”

“You could always move to Africa, post a big dowry, snare a husband, and have your own ceremony.”

She looks him in the eye again and mouths, “Fuck you,” those prim lips, forming precisely around each word, dwelling slightly on the latter as if slowly letting it go.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” he says. “It was crude and stupid.”

He raises his unused soup spoon off the tablecloth and lets it drop with a soft thud.

“Come on,” he says. “I want to show you something.”