XXV

Mrs. March spent the next few days jumping in surprise whenever Jonathan appeared, always apparently out of nowhere. She’d then remember his suspension, and she’d try, in her way, to talk to him, but Jonathan, like his mother, wasn’t a natural conversationalist. He often avoided eye contact, but when he did look at her she considered the things the principal had hinted at. How well could one really know an eight-year-old child, she pondered.

Not knowing quite what to do with him, she bought him colored pencils and illustrated books and asked Martha to deliver sandwich- and fruit-laden trays to his bedroom. One morning she took him ice skating at Wollman Rink. It was a cool, clean January day, the azure sky seemingly dyeing the buildings blue.

As she waited for Jonathan to put on his skates, a voice erupted nearby, and when a man, bellowing madly, burst out of the surrounding trees and ran toward her, she froze, clutching her ermine stole. Realizing he was holding his infant son in his arms, growling in play as the child screeched with delight, she smiled at them, heart pounding so violently her ribs felt bruised. It was an effort to collect herself and loosen her grip on the strangled fur as Jonathan wobbled onto the rink.

As she watched him from the sidelines, she recognized a familiar face among the onlookers—the mother of one of Jonathan’s classmates. At first Mrs. March tried to shield herself from the woman, cupping her hand against her forehead as if she were shading her eyes from the sun, but alas, she had been spotted.

“It’s me! Margaret, Margaret Melrose? I’m Peter’s mother.” Squat Margaret was there with her toddler and husband. Mrs. March’s mood lightened at this, for the husband’s weekday appearance at Central Park possibly meant that he had been laid off.

“John took the day off work to spend some time with us,” Margaret said, beaming with pride.

“That’s lovely,” said Mrs. March.

“Is that Jonathan? Why’s he here on a school day?”

“Well,” sighed Mrs. March, “his grandmother is quite ill. He’s rather close to her. I thought I’d give him a few days off school.” She leaned into Margaret and said in a low voice, “We don’t think she’ll make it past Sunday, so”—nodding at Margaret’s gratifying gasp—“this may be the last week he gets with her.”

“Oh, gosh,” said Margaret, looking horrified. “I’m so sorry. How sweet of you to give him this. I’m sure he really appreciates it.”

Mrs. March smiled and lowered her eyes in a show of modesty. She pictured Margaret Melrose welcoming her son home from school that evening, telling him that she’d seen Jonathan at the rink and informing him gravely of the sickly grandmother, trying to impress on her son how important it was that he treat Jonathan kindly over the next few weeks. The son, puzzled, would shyly tell his mother the truth. Perhaps, with any luck, he wouldn’t know the exact reason for Jonathan’s suspension, but children, Mrs. March knew, were cruel gossips and not to be trusted with rumors.

“Where is George?” asked Margaret, brightly shifting the subject. “Working, I expect?”

“Ah. Yes. He’s having an intense publication, what with all the press and everything. You know.”

“I really loved his new book.”

“Oh, I’ve yet to read it,” blurted Mrs. March. She was too exhausted by her previous lie to utter yet another.

“Oh, you should,” said Margaret, winking. “You really, really should.”

You really, really should. Mrs. March studied Margaret’s winter-cracked lips as they formed the words. As Margaret walked back to her family Mrs. March turned to the rink. Everyone had stopped skating. They stood, unblinking, looking at her—not just the skaters but the onlookers as well, had craned their necks to stare at her, locking eyes, one after the other, like the portraits in the museum, refusing to break their gazes. Jonathan, in the center of the rink, smiled at her with all his teeth.

Mrs. March stumbled backward and buried her face in her hands. She breathed loudly in her mint green gloves—where it was dark and soft and safe—until her breath began to sound like that of a stranger.

At the sound of the chirping of birds and the scratching of blades on ice, she removed her hands. The ice rink was as it had been before—bustling and loud, indifferent to her, the background music festive. Overcome with relief, she motioned to get Jonathan’s attention. “It’s time to go home!” she called out.

As they left—Jonathan sulky and refusing to wear his hat—Margaret called out to them, but Mrs. March pretended not to hear.

They made their way through the park, past promenading tourists and amateur watercolorists. Jonathan pointed to a fractured, empty bottle of Veuve Clicquot in a trash can, which Mrs. March warned him not to touch.

Mrs. March sensed, out of the corner of her eye, a shadowy figure following them—standing a few feet away, just out of sight—but every time she turned to look, she spotted no one. She panted, her deepening anxiety slowing her pace like a twisted ankle. She was just being paranoid, she told herself. She had dreaded his return for years, had seeded her subconscious with the expectation that she would bump into him at the grocery store, at the florist’s, anywhere, really. She could still see him sometimes, behind closed eyelids—a dark silhouette, hands in his pockets, standing against the sun.

“Can we come back tomorrow?” asked Jonathan, somewhere below her.

“We’ll see.”

The man had worn a short-sleeved shirt adorned with tiny embroidered tennis rackets. Could she have seen the shirt now, among the trees? Surely he wouldn’t be wearing the same shirt in the cold, she reasoned. Or did he want her to recognize him?

“Can we have hot dogs for dinner?”

“Not tonight, Jonathan.”

“Alec has them all the time.”

Mrs. March flinched at a crunch to her left—twigs breaking under a heavy shoe?—and walked faster, ignoring Jonathan’s complaints as he struggled to keep up.

She had been about thirteen. She didn’t remember much about herself at that age, except for her legs. What a funny thing to remember about oneself, she thought, but there it was. Before puberty altered her shape, a young Mrs. March had long, spindly legs—daddy-longlegs legs. They were especially tan that summer in the south of Spain, coated in a soft blond down. She remembered Cádiz as if she had dreamt it or seen it on a movie screen—bush-topped dunes cupping the beach, loud barefoot men selling shrimp on the shore, and a bitterly crashing sea that glittered. The sound of the waves was constant and inescapable, deep and rough like breathing, and would not quiet, even at night.

In Cádiz the days were long and Mrs. March grew bored and restless. Her parents had traveled over thirty-five hundred miles to discover that they did not in fact much care for the beach. They took the occasional halfhearted walk up and down the shoreline—Mrs. March lagging moodily behind—but spent most days lounging at the pool in silence, sipping margaritas and concealing any trace of enjoyment under large sunglasses. They had urged her to make friends but she was at that age when making friends was tricky, when one wasn’t as uninhibited as a younger child nor welcomed yet among adults, where the rules of etiquette at least guaranteed a minimum politeness. So she spent the majority of her days moping, burdened with a heavy emptiness, taking uneasy dips by herself in the sea, worried about what lurked underneath—not just scales and pincers and stingers, but the evidence of other bathers: stained Band-Aids and warm patches of urine. The wind carried the chatter and intermittent shouts of nearby swimmers. In the afternoons she’d take shelter from the sun in her hotel room, occasionally venturing into the lobby to inspect the books left by other guests on the shelves or to try on the straw hats on the wire display racks in the gift shop. All the television channels in her room were in German, and indeed all the tourists seemed to be German—the men sported tight, revealing briefs, and the women had hair so blond it was almost white, and their backs and thighs were painfully pink from the sun, streaked through by bikini-strap tan lines.

At night when the fishing boats emerged, lights blinking across salmon-pink and lavender horizons, she thought she could see a big-breasted figure bobbing up and down in the ocean at an alarming distance from the shore, and every time she would realize, as if for the first time, that it was just a buoy.

She had first seen the man looking at her on the hotel deck (later she concluded that she had actually seen him all over before that, but she had only become aware of it afterwards). The deck overlooked the beach, surrounded by palm trees, their pineapple-skin trunks lit from below. She’d finished her dinner but her parents were still enjoying the buffet, where a group of flamenco musicians sang and clapped as a woman with big hair and a pained expression danced and stamped on the floor. There was laughter and festivity in the air, and the spectacle made her feel as if everyone around her had been drugged or hypnotized into compliance. Her parents had befriended a young married couple and had been drinking merrily with them for days. It irritated her how her mother, usually so cold and distant, could manage to appear friendly enough to make such close friends in less than a week.

Unwilling to make an effort to join in the fun, she had sulked off to the deck, where other guests were smoking and drinking cocktails. She ordered herself a Virgin San Francisco and stood against the handrail sucking on the maraschino cherry when she noticed the man in the shirt with the tiny tennis rackets. He was watching her, his lips pursed into an expression she couldn’t decipher. “Sorry,” she said, and threw the cherry over the handrail into the sand, assuming that he’d found her rude for sucking on it so loudly.

“Does that have alcohol in it?” the man asked, jutting his chin toward the peach-colored cocktail in her hand.

“No,” she said, her voice emotional with that need teenagers have, sometimes, to be believed. “No, of course not.”

“Figures,” he said, somehow closer to her, although she hadn’t seen him move. He was leaning on the handrail, resting on his elbows. “Kind of a boring party, don’t you think?”

She nodded and sipped. His eyes bore into her as she desperately thought of something clever to say, when he suddenly stood up straight and turned away from her. Fearing that he had lost interest, she blurted, “Well, I’m going to the beach to see the fireworks.”

“Fireworks?”

She nodded. “Every night at ten. You can see them much better from down below. They reflect off the ocean. It’s very powerful.” She once heard a museum tour guide describe a painting as powerful. It struck her as a very mature way to describe something.

The man looked at her, hands in his pockets.

“Well,” she said, “I’m going now.”

She abandoned her unfinished cocktail and made her way across the deck, toward the long wooden bridge that led down to the beach. She hoped that he would follow her. She was tired of being alone, and she’d have to pretend to be happy looking at the fireworks by herself in case he could see her from the deck. The whole scene would be rather humiliating.

He did follow her, however, and they both walked down the bridge together. Once they reached the sand, she allowed herself a closer look at him. It was a dark night—the sky an inky black against the stars and moon—but they were dimly illuminated by the yellow lights strung around the bridge’s handrail. They stopped when they got to the beach and threw subtle glances at each other. He had sunken cheeks and light green eyes. She looked at his forearms, noticing gray hairs interspersed with the black ones.

A couple strolled past them, hand in hand. The woman was smoking a cigarette and, in a brief fit of bravado, Mrs. March skipped up to her and asked her for one. The woman handed her a cigarette and lit it for her, and Mrs. March sauntered back toward her new acquaintance feeling like a real adult.

“Tell me your name,” he said.

“My friends call me Kiki,” she said.

“How exotic. Exactly how old are you?” he asked her.

“Sixteen, seventeen next month,” she said, coughing.

“Are you excited for college?”

She contemplated his question as if she were appraising jewelry, and, exhaling a cloud of smoke into his face, she answered, “Oh, yes. Although, you know, I’m going more for the adventure of it than anything else.”

He grinned at that, his jaw dimpling, his nostrils flaring, and her stomach looped. “Sure,” he said. “I don’t remember much of my college days. I think I drank them all away.”

She dropped her cigarette butt into the sand and said grandly, “That’s a pity.”

“Yes. It is.”

They had been slowly making their way along the dunes, leaving the bridge lights behind. For once the sea seemed mercifully quiet, the waves lapping the shore softly.

His arm brushed against hers as they walked, but she pretended not to notice. She blew a puff of air upward and her bangs fluttered up in what she hoped was a playful yet charming manner, and he laughed, and she giggled. He leaned over and blew into her face, making her bangs flutter again. “Don’t,” she said, laughing.

“Are you here with your parents?”

“Yes.”

“What do you do here all day?”

“I’m writing a novel,” she said.

“Are you really?” His astonishment was a burst of sweet, surprising pleasure, like biting into a liqueur-filled truffle.

“Yes. I’m sure it isn’t any good,” she said, looking at the ground, “but I will finish it sometime next year. By spring, I think.”

“That’s impressive,” he said. “I wish I had time to write a book.”

“One has to make time for things that are important.” She smiled.

The man moved closer to the water, and when she saw him removing his shoes, she asked, “What are you doing?”

“I want to feel the sand and the sea on my feet,” he said, swaying as he pulled off his shoes. “I’m afraid I’m a little drunk. There.” He placed his rolled-up socks inside the shoes. “I hate walking on the beach in shoes, don’t you? I feel so constrained.”

She nodded in agreement and bent down to remove her own shoes—new white tennis shoes her mother had bought for this trip, dismissing her petition for flip-flops as an unrefined fad. As she unlaced them, she could somehow sense how intensely he was looking at her. In response, she sported a furtive pose as she slowly peeled off her socks.

“You have incredibly dainty feet,” he said, and when she had straightened up, he placed a hand on her shoulder. “Do you know how attractive you are?” he said. He leaned into her, his eyes like the green parchment of cats’ eyes. “Don’t,” she said as the lightness she had only just experienced transformed into a heaviness that rooted her to the ground.

They were alone in a shadowy corner of the dunes between hotels, the water creeping nearer with the changing tide. The sand was cold and hard, unresponsive under her feet, so different from how it presented itself during the daytime.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t recall what had happened that night under the fireworks, it was just that she had preferred to remember it as having happened to somebody else. Some girl from her school or even a friend of her sister’s. Or it might not have happened to anyone. Maybe it was a cautionary tale she’d heard, a story of a foolish girl playing grown-up.

Dragging Jonathan out of Central Park, she cut through the long line of carriage horses. Despite the blinders, their eyes of polished mahogany followed her, bulging, the whites streaked with vessels.

The devil had gotten inside her that night in Cádiz, she decided with surprising aplomb, and somehow he was working his way into her home, like the cockroaches, through some imperceptible gap. He’d found the opening, and soon he would get in.