It would be a snakes-and-ladders journey from Green Turtle Cay to Cape Cod, a series of short hops and slow crawls by ferry, taxicab, commuter propeller aircraft and scheduled jetliner.
For McGuire, no part of the journey would be longer than the walk down the hill from his cabin to the dock, an overnight bag over his shoulder and Barbara clenching his hand.
“I’m giving you three days,” she said, leaning toward him and kissing his ear. “Then I’m coming after you.” She wore a red gingham blouse tied at the waist above beltless jeans that clung to the lower half of her body like a lover. On her feet were woven leather sandals scattered with rhinestones that exploded suddenly in the sunlight.
“I won’t need that long,” McGuire grumbled. He was tense, like someone waiting in an empty house for the doorbell to ring. Leaving Barbara was a penance, payment due for the unexpected joy he had experienced. You always pay for happiness somehow, McGuire believed. “The funeral’s tomorrow, the will’s being read the next day. I’ll be back on the weekend.” He guided her around a sharp turn in the path.
When they reached a switchback, Barbara stopped, gripped his arm until he turned to her, and held him in the focus of her eyes.
“The ferry’s coming in,” he said, avoiding her gaze.
She looked over his shoulder at the approach of one of the new ferry boats which had replaced the old converted island freighter that had plied the strait between the cays for years. The new ferries were small, fast and unquestionably ugly, their windowed cabin boasting all the aesthetics of a shoe box. As she watched, one of them, painted green and white, rumbled its way between a fleet of sports fishing boats anchored in the marina.
“It’ll wait,” Barbara said.
McGuire looked from the ferry into her eyes.
A lonely middle-aged man often discovers women he believes he should have married. They are always younger than himself, yet equal or superior to him in many ways: in their carriage, their apparent self-assurance, the easy manner they have in performing the smallest obligations of life. As he grew older, McGuire encountered more of these women in street cafés, airport lounges and passing taxicabs and on the arms of younger, less deserving men. The women were suddenly there in the sweep of his vision and then were gone, leaving only a brief smile, a whiff of perfume, a small gesture with their hand as fleeting proof of their existence.
After the collapse of McGuire’s second marriage, they also left behind a realization that weighed heavily on his chest, as though the air in his lungs had been replaced by water. It was the recognition that his life had been, and would continue to be, haphazard and somehow more unfair than it should.
To McGuire, Barbara had been one of those women from the first moment she entered the bar at Green Turtle Cay. Her beauty fascinated and almost inhibited him, and her family’s immense wealth added to the intrigue by making her appear unattainable. But when he responded to her pain with sensitivity, he shattered the social barriers between them. He became a source of strength to her and Barbara’s hunger for him promised in turn to correct the imbalance of his life.
She symbolized an escape, perhaps, from the stoked rage that burned within McGuire and, because he was a man who had long ago replaced happiness with hope, he loved and feared her for it.
“I’ll be here when you return,” she said, and kissed him lightly on the lips.
They continued down the path toward the harbour. Bertrand, the cocky young Bahamian who operated the dive shop and won money from tourists in all-night backgammon marathons, was pulling his boat away from the pier while the divers checked their air tanks. Bertrand’s black mongrel dog sat upright in the bow, his pink tongue tasting the wind. A two-masted schooner, its sails furled and small inboard engine humming, was threading its way between other boats into the harbour, its dinghy following like an obedient animal. The scratchy cries of the pair of parrots that nested in a grove of trees at the end of the harbour echoed over the water, and McGuire watched the birds fly in tandem past his line of sight, their red and blue plumage almost too brilliant to be real.
My God, I’m leaving all of this, McGuire realized. Why? he wondered. Why, even for a few days?
“You’re staying in Boston tonight?” Barbara gripped his hand, extending one arm for balance as they slid down the last short, steep incline of the path.
“With an old buddy and his wife.” McGuire followed the birds as they swooped and glided above the trees. “My former partner.”
“The man who’s paralyzed?”
“Yes.” He took his eyes from the parrots and watched the ferry ease into the dock. Three guests of the Green Turtle Club, preparing for their return to the mainland after a week’s stay on the Cay, sat wearily on their luggage at the end of the pier.
“You’ll enjoy that,” she said, trying to encourage him.
“Probably.”
“Joe?” She stopped at the bottom of the hill, above the dock. “I’m going to say goodbye here, okay? Not on the pier with all those people around.”
“What’ll you do the rest of the day?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Go for a walk on Ocean Beach. Catch the night ferry back to Treasure Cay. Read a book. Think about you.”
They kissed again, awkwardly this time, both wanting more than they dared to take. Then she ducked her head and turned to ascend the hill again.
From the open rear deck of the ferry, as it tore a ragged wake across the water, McGuire watched her standing at the switchback halfway up the hill, one arm raised and waving for him to see until the ferry rounded the peninsula and the town of New Plymouth and she was gone from sight.
The journey continued with a cab ride from the Treasure Cay ferry dock to the airport and a bumpy flight on a Bahamair Twin Cessna to Fort Lauderdale. After a surly customs official inspected each pocket of McGuire’s luggage and clothing, the trip resumed with a maddening wait at the airport, three hours in the cramped seat of a DC-9 to Boston and thirty minutes in the back of a rattletrap cab before McGuire arrived at Revere Beach with a headache and a sense of loss, a feeling that he had taken a wrong exit somewhere on a road he didn’t know and had never intended to travel.
But the sight of the small white frame house belonging to Ollie and Ronnie Schantz cheered him, and Ronnie was out the door and running down the walk while McGuire was still paying the cab fare. She wrapped him in her arms and squeezed him until he asked her to stop, then she held his head in her hands and looked at him.
“You’re getting younger,” she said in mock anger. “How do you do that? You look younger now than the last time I saw you.”
“And you’re getting prettier,” McGuire replied, kissing her lightly on the cheek.
The cab pulled away, leaving them standing in the late afternoon sunshine, both hesitating because they knew what they would face inside the house.
“His lungs, his kidneys and who knows what else,” Ronnie Schantz whispered over the lip of a coffee mug.
They were in the kitchen, seated at the small white enameled table amid arrangements of dried flowers, ceramic jars filled with fragrant potpourri and framed pictures of young children holding deep conversations with quizzical lambs and puppies with enormous eyes. A plate of untouched hermit cookies sat between them.
“The doctors say it’s common in paralyzed people. They could treat it better if Ollie were in a chronic care hospital, but . . .” She shrugged.
“He won’t go,” McGuire finished.
She nodded. “And I won’t force him. I’d rather have him dying here with me to care for him than somewhere downtown where I might get to drop in once or twice a week or whatever.” She set the coffee cup down and bowed her head, her hair a nest of spun snow. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night, Joe. I’m upstairs tossing and turning and I just want to talk to somebody. So I’ll come downstairs, it’s four in the morning, and he’ll always be awake, waiting for me. He’ll know I was having a bad night and he’ll say, ‘What took you so long, sport?’ and I’ll make some coffee with a little bit of cognac in it and I let him sip it and we talk.”
“About what?”
“Anything. Anything at all. Old friends and world problems and how the sky gets that strange glow when the sun drops behind the horizon and whether the teenage kid next door is selling drugs and where we ate the best fried clams we ever tasted.”
She blinked and turned away, holding up a hand to ward off McGuire as he reached for her. “No, I’m all right. I’m okay. These . . . these are what you get from a good marriage, Joe. Not a perfect one. There is no perfect marriage. But a good one. You store them up, little by little and day by day, and when all the mystery’s gone and the passion’s faded and you wonder what it would have been like to have spent your life with somebody else, you draw on these things. Each of you, you draw them out and exchange them with the other person and, if you’re lucky, you can say, ‘It was worth it.’”
She looked across at McGuire, her eyes blinking furiously now, this woman who as a young mother had watched the wheels of a suburban bus crush her only child and who had greeted her paralyzed husband at the door of their home barely a year ago.
Her expression told McGuire it had been worth it.
Ronnie Schantz turned at a sound from down the hall. “I think he’s awake,” she said, standing and smoothing her apron. “Let’s go. He’ll be so happy to see you.”
The room at the rear of the house had been planned as a den, with floor to ceiling bookshelves framing the view of Massachusetts Bay through an expansive window. But when Ollie arrived home after the fishing accident in New Brunswick, crippled in the heartbeat of time it took him to fall backwards and shatter a neck vertebra against the gunwale of his boat, the den was converted into Ollie’s permanent preserve. The walls were painted white, a motorized cot was positioned for the best view of the water and a police scanner and speaker telephone were located for Ollie to operate with the limited use of his right hand. In a corner sat a personal computer linked with the mainframe unit at Boston Police Headquarters.
It had been almost six months since McGuire visited Ollie.
McGuire tried to disguise his reaction to the sight of his former partner, the man’s body now shrunk to little more than parchment stretched between tired bones.
“Joseph, you’re lookin’ terrific,” Ollie said in the hoarse rattle that was a mocking ghost of his once-powerful voice.
“I told him he’s getting younger,” Ronnie added. “He’s found a way to turn the clock back.”
“Lemme see, lemme see.” Ollie waved McGuire closer with a flicker of his good hand. The two men stared into each other’s eyes for a moment, McGuire grinning, Ollie frowning, before Ollie shifted his gaze back to his wife. “Son of a gun’s got himself a woman,” he said, as though announcing a scientific discovery. “See it in his eyes. Got a look in there you could pour over a waffle.”
McGuire sat in Ollie’s bedside chair. “I met someone a few weeks ago,” he said. “She’s special.”
Ollie replied with a grunt. Ronnie puttered with some items near the computer.
“Still solving cases for Berkeley Street?” McGuire asked.
Ollie closed his eyes and moved his head slightly from side to side.
“Not much anymore,” Ronnie Schantz said. “Fat Eddie Vance doesn’t like to admit he and his crowd can’t do the job. So he rarely calls.”
McGuire swore.
“Go easy on Fat Eddie now,” Ollie said. “Gotta remember, he’s at that awkward age. Too old to be aborted and too young for euthanasia.”
McGuire smiled while Ollie Schantz watched with approval. Ollie was one of the few people in the world who could make McGuire smile.
“What’re you here for?” Ollie Schantz asked. “Didn’t come to show off your tan, I’ll bet.”
“My aunt died Monday.” McGuire crossed his legs and rubbed the palm of one hand with the fingertips of the other. “She and I were the only survivors in the whole damn family. I’m here for her funeral tomorrow and the reading of the will.”
“And you’re going back when?” Ronnie Schantz asked.
“Two days. Three at the most.”
“You’ll drop by before heading south again, won’t you?” It was more an order than a question from Ronnie.
“Sure will,” McGuire smiled.
“And you’re stayin’ here tonight?” Ollie asked.
“That’s the plan.” He ducked his head and twisted to look at Ronnie. “Guess I forgot to ask.”
“There was never any question,” Ronnie replied, standing. “I’ll get your room fixed up.”
“You pretty close to this aunt of yours?” Ollie asked.
“Cora?” McGuire nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I was. Didn’t stay close. Meant to, but . . .” He shrugged. “I spent a few summers with her and her husband and their son when I was a teenager. They had this house on the Cape, in Compton. Nice place. Terry, their son, was a few months older than me. He died in Vietnam trying to storm a mortar emplacement. That was Terry’s style. When her husband Earl died a few years later, Cora turned tough and uncompromising. She always had been but this just cemented it for her. She became a disturber, demonstrating against the war, carrying on at town meetings, refusing to pay her taxes. You don’t do those things in a place like Compton, and she lost a lot of friends over the years.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?” Ollie asked.
“Five, six years ago. Around the time Micki left me. I needed to talk to her.”
No, he corrected himself silently. I needed to put my head in her lap and cry like a baby.
“You drivin’ down tomorrow?”
McGuire nodded. “Should be able to rent a car from some place on Shore Road.”
“Stayin’ in her house while you’re up there?”
Another nod.
“Can hardly wait to get your gonads back to that woman you left in the Bahamas, you with ’em.”
“No panic,” McGuire said. “I’ll stop in here for a visit before I go.”
“Sure.” Ollie smiled, his oversized mouth stretching into a cold straight line. “Sure you will, Joseph. Maybe you’d better get some sleep now.”
From the kitchen, McGuire placed a telephone call to Barbara’s villa on Treasure Cay but the Bahamian maid said she was sleeping and did not wish to be disturbed until morning. McGuire asked the maid to tell Barbara he had called, to say he had arrived safely and would call again tomorrow. The maid promised she would.
In the darkness of the spare room, McGuire took a very long time to fall asleep, in spite of his fatigue.