Second Nature

  “Floribunda,” Robin said, pleased to discover the rose Stephen handed her didn’t wilt as soon as she touched it. She’d been foolish to think she’d been cursed. Some plants died and others lived, and human touch had nothing to do with it. “The old name for it,” she explained to Stephen. “From the Latin.” She pulled her hair back into an elastic band. “We have to cut this all back. Pronto.”

  It was good to work with Stephen; he worked hard and he didn’t say much, and at noon he walked down to the bakery to get them both lunch. They had agreed he needed as much practice as possible going to stores, making small talk, waiting for the light to turn red before he crossed the street. But sitting on the Feldmans’ lawn, waiting for him to return, Robin realized that she was almost sorry he was such a good student. He had learned to read more quickly than she’d ever imagined possible; he was already on chapter books. A few days ago he had asked for an atlas, and it wasn’t until she had brought one home from the library that she understood why he’d wanted it. She’d had the urge to take the atlas right back, but then he’d been so grateful when she gave it to him she’d felt silly and selfish. She opened the book and showed him the blue curves of Michigan and watched as he ran a finger over the lines that signified rivers and roads.

  He brought back two tuna salad sandwiches and two bottles of spring water, and handed her the change, which he had tried his best to count. They unwrapped their lunches and didn’t speak as they ate. They moved only to wave away the bees. Robin tilted her face toward the sun and closed her eyes. Of course he wanted to go back; at night he was memorizing all the routes leading west, he was sounding out the numbers and the names. The mission had always been to let him decide his own fate, but that didn’t mean Robin had to think about it. She didn’t have to think about the atlas, left open on the oak dresser in his room. She would not think about how close they were sitting, or even allow herself to wonder if, by this time in her life, she shouldn’t have a little more sense.

  Michelle Altero rarely got angry, and when she did, those who knew her could tell something was wrong after one look. Her face puckered and grew flushed; her mouth formed a hard, straight line. The students she counseled at the high school thought she was a pushover; they liked her generous spirit and knew she wasn’t in the least bit dangerous, unless someone was bullied or mistreated and that angry look of hers took over, which meant there’d be a price to pay.

  Working in a high school meant never hearing anything straight-out; information just sort of filtered down. Who was dating, who was flunking out, whose father had missed his AA meetings, whose mother had hit the roof over a Master-Card bill or a dented fender. Snatches of conversations drifted through the hallways, whispers arose in the study hall, messages were scrawled in lipstick on the bathroom walls. And so it happened that Michelle was hearing the latest gossip with half an ear, not paying much attention until she realized that the girl everyone was talking about was her daughter Lydia. Lydia was madly in love, that’s what they were saying. She was sneaking out at night, when her parents were already in bed asleep, down to one of the shacks on the beach. One rainy morning, she had walked over the bridge and taken the bus to Great Neck and gotten herself a prescription for the pill, then hitchhiked back home before anyone knew she’d been gone. Michelle locked herself in her office and canceled all her appointments. Lydia was just seventeen. She never had to be reminded to wash the breakfast dishes; her grades were straight A’s. Was this the sort of girl who would lie to her parents, hitchhike, pull off her underpants in a cold shack the fishermen had abandoned when Richard Aaron bought the island, start off so early in ruining her life? Of course she was not, and that was why Michelle did exactly what she always cautioned parents about. She assumed she knew where to place the blame.

  That evening at dinner, everyone knew to avoid Michelle. She didn’t take a single bite of the Boston cream pie she’d bought at the bakery. She slammed the clean dishes into the cabinets after supper, chipping the edges of the plates.

  “Uh-oh,” Jenny whispered to her sister. “Watch out for Mom. Red alert.”

  But the explosion never came, and as darkness fell, they all thought they were safe. Paul went into the den and turned on the TV; Jenny trooped upstairs, flopped on her bed, and finished her homework. While Lydia carefully chose her clothes for the next day, Michelle put on a sweater and walked down Mansfield Terrace to Robin’s house.

  “Oh, boy,” Robin said as soon as she opened the door. “Who are you mad at? Paul?”

  Michelle went into the kitchen, but she was too fired up to sit at the table or have a cup of tea.

  “Lydia’s sleeping with someone,” Michelle said.

  Connor and the student they had living with them were playing chess in the living room, so Michelle kept her voice down, but her face was getting more and more puckered.

  “Lydia?” Robin said. “No. She’s much too young.”

  “Really?” Michelle said. “How old were you when you started with Roy?”

  “That was different,” Robin said. “I was stupid. And look where it got me.”

  “Precisely,” Michelle said. “Lydia has been talked into it. That’s what’s happened. She’s been tricked.”

  In the living room, Connor was looking at his watch, missing the opportunity to put Stephen in check. Clearly he wasn’t paying attention, but Stephen had already learned this was a game without mercy, so he made his best move. They were playing by candlelight, and one moth hovered above the flame. Michelle watched them through the doorway; she had her back to Robin, she didn’t want her to see there were tears in her eyes.

  “I have to find out who it is,” Michelle said. “Then Paul will talk to the boy. God, will he talk to him.”

  “You want my advice?” Robin said. “Stay out of it.”

  Michelle turned to her then. “Easy for you to say. Isn’t it? Your son’s in there playing chess. Why should you worry?”

  “You’re right,” Robin said. “Don’t listen to me. I’m an idiot about these things.”

  Robin smiled, but she was looking past Michelle. In the living room, where he’d just put Connor in check, Stephen was looking right back at her. When Robin finally turned away, she laughed, for no reason at all. Michelle buttoned her sweater; there were chills up and down her arms. She was in her best friend’s kitchen, and yet she had the sense that she was unwelcome. What is happening here? she thought. As she walked home in the dark, it suddenly seemed as if Mansfield Terrace was the very end of the earth. One step, and there was the edge. What did we know about those closest to us, really? No one ever dared to speak plainly about desire; no one said the word out loud.

  By the time Michelle got home, Lydia was up in the bathroom. She smiled at herself in the mirror and began to brush her hair. Her whole life had changed, and you couldn’t even tell by looking at her. She could barely remember who she was before, or what on earth had been important to her. When there was a knock on the door, Lydia’s stomach flipped over. Could it be that she really had a mother and a father and a little sister, who was right now rifling through her jewelry box, searching for dangling earrings and bangle bracelets?

  “I’m in here,” Lydia called. “Stay out.”

  Michelle came in anyway and closed the door behind her. Not a week went by that she didn’t counsel a junior or senior about birth control; she believed she never once made a moral judgment. But this was different. This was her daughter.

  “Mom!” Lydia said. “Can’t you wait?”

  “I want to know who he is,” Michelle said.

  Lydia eyed her mother coolly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “The boy,” Michelle said. “Don’t lie to me.”

  Lydia bit her lip. Just thinking about Connor, imagining the goofy look he had on his face the first time she took off her blouse, made her smile. They hadn’t planned to keep their love secret; it had just turned out that way. They didn’t want to be bothered with nosy famili
es and friends. The last person on earth Lydia would consider sharing her news with was her mother.

  “Get that smirk off your face,” Michelle said.

  Before Michelle could stop herself, she smacked Lydia. Lydia’s head reeled back; her blue eyes were wide and they stung. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw the red hand mark on her face.

  “Oh, my God,” Michelle said. “Lydia, I didn’t mean that.”

  They were staring at each other in the mirror. For an instant, Michelle looked so crumpled, so very far away from being young, she hardly recognized herself. Hadn’t she just been the one who was seventeen?

  “Oh, yes you did,” Lydia said. She felt something burst inside her, as if she’d just been granted her freedom. She raised her chin, and her eyes were perfectly clear. “You meant it,” she said.

  That night Lydia didn’t bother climbing out her window. She put on her boots and a heavy sweater and left by the front door. It was after eleven, and Paul had already fallen asleep, but beside him in their bed, Michelle was wide awake, and she heard the door open, then close. She could have jumped out of bed and chased Lydia down the front path; she could have phoned Roy down at the station and had him pick up the boy Lydia was off to meet and give him a good scare. Instead, she kept her head on her pillow and listened to her husband shift in his sleep. She knew then why parents often came to her office distraught, torn apart by what was really only a minor transgression. She knew why she’d been beside herself with worry. There came a moment when quite suddenly a mother realized that a child was no longer hers, and for Michelle that moment had already come and gone. Without bothering to ask, or even give notice, her daughter had just grown up.

  FOUR

  OLD DICK HAD LIVED FOR almost a century, but even that wasn’t nearly long enough. Common knowledge would certainly lead anyone to believe that more than thirty thousand mornings and afternoons spent lugging flesh and bones around would tire a man out and leave him begging for eternal rest. This was not true. It was absolute bullshit. At the age of ninety-one, Richard Aaron had never found the earth more beautiful or more distant. Some nights he dreamed he was flying, and in his dreams he reached out his arms. There was so much he wanted. But he was moving far too quickly to walk on the grass or touch the newly spaded dirt or kiss the girl who was waving to him from below, and when he woke up, and discovered his body was old, he swore at his housekeeper, and had the curtains drawn against the sun, and threw his pathetic breakfast of cooked cereal and weak tea on the floor, all of which led everyone to assume he was tired of life, as if that could ever be the case.

  He’d been remarkably smart as a boy, surprising even himself. Not with lessons learned in school; he hadn’t bothered with that. Human nature was what he understood, and he’d made a good deal of money in ways he wasn’t particularly proud of, all because he knew what men wanted or, maybe more important, what they wanted to believe. It was the possibility of paradise, here on earth. With guidance, such a thing could be found on city streets in Manhattan, in the dredged swamps of Florida, over in New Jersey, where all a man had to do was take a deep breath and he’d know he was there. Old Dick’s mistake wasn’t that he convinced others what they dreamed could be had, for very little cash down, it was that he’d believed it himself. He’d heard about the island during a poker game, played for high stakes with several of the building inspectors he regularly bribed. The land was mud and straw, he was told, and the air wicked and muggy; a man who walked through the marshes would take ill by morning. Since he never listened to anyone, Aaron went out to see for himself. He was already past thirty, with a wife and new baby, a straightforward man who never acted on impulse. He didn’t even know he was looking for something until he walked across to the island and realized he’d found it.

  Another man might have been bitter when his fortune disappeared, when his wife and son died much too young, when his grandchildren were shuttled into his care in what was already his old age, but not Richard Aaron. He’d gotten what he wanted, he had it still, even though he no longer owned it on paper; his only regret was that he now had to look at the island from his dusty bedroom window. What he wouldn’t give for more time and strong legs. So there it was, a joke, really: Once you had paradise, what good did it do you? The mattress he slept on was filled with hundred-dollar bills, all worthless to him now. So he yelled at Ginny, who’d helped raise his grandchildren and never listened to him anyway, and he waited for the last Sunday of the month, when his grand-daughter brought him his contraband pie, laced with brown sugar and cinnamon, and he found some interest in living long enough to see who his great-grandson would turn out to be.

  Old Dick was in his bed next to the window, scanning the Island Tribune—he could read only the large print of the headlines, even with his glasses—when he heard Robin’s truck pull up. It was the end of June, and everything was perfectly green, the way it was before the heat of summer came and turned the edges of the leaves paper-thin and brown. Old Dick had jimmied his window open a crack in spite of Ginny’s vow that he’d catch pneumonia; he liked to hear the birds calling and the crunch of the gravel in his driveway when his grand-daughter came to visit. Robin and Connor got out of the truck; she was wearing shorts and sneakers and a pale blue shirt, and yes, she had the pie. Old Dick could feel his mouth water; disgusted with himself, he wiped his lips. He hadn’t seen his great-grandson for long enough to be surprised by how tall he’d grown; Connor had inherited his height from Old Dick, who’d passed six feet when he was fourteen, then grown a bit more, as if he’d needed the extra height to accomplish all his plans. Someone else was in the truck, behind the wheel, but as far as Old Dick could tell, he wasn’t much of a driver. When the truck was pulled over by the garden, where hundreds of yellow tulips had once grown, it bucked, then stalled out. Old Dick rapped on the window and Robin looked up, then waved.

  “Who’s there?” Old Dick called. His voice was shaky; the truth was, he wasn’t talking much these days, and it took all his strength just to scream at Ginny. Afterward he’d have to take a good two-hour nap.

  “Us,” Robin called back.

  “Maybe he doesn’t remember us,” Connor said. “Hey, Gramps,” he shouted.

  “In the truck.” Old Dick signaled. “Bring him up.”

  “I told you this was a bad idea,” Robin said to Connor.

  “He needed the practice,” Connor insisted.

  Connor wouldn’t let go of his plan for Stephen to schedule a road test with him in the winter. For the past two weeks they’d been teaching him how to drive, and as far as Stephen was concerned, reading was simple compared with parallel parking.

  “My grandfather wants you to visit,” Robin told him through the open window of the parked truck.

  Stephen got out, but he hung back, worried.

  “He’ll do all the talking,” Robin said. “If he yells, just ignore him.”

  They passed beneath the arbor where the wisteria grew, then followed the path to the door of the garage apartment. Across the lawn was the big house where Robin and Stuart had grown up. They had tried to donate it to the county or the state, but nobody wanted it; the house was too expensive to keep up, or even to heat, and now a whole section of the roof had blown away. Egrets were roosting in the chimney.

  “Hide the pie,” Robin whispered when they heard Ginny’s heavy footsteps approaching.

  Connor slipped the pie box between some magazines they had brought along. Robin actually felt giddy, like the naughty child she used to be. On the drive here, George Tenney had pulled them over, and this time he’d had a good reason: Stephen had driven right through an intersection, ignoring the stop sign on the corner.

  “You didn’t stop!” Robin said, as George got out of his patrol car and walked toward them. She and Connor and Stephen were wedged into the pickup, and Robin wished there were room for her to change places with Stephen so that George wouldn’t find him at the wheel.

  “I could see no one was coming,” Steph
en said. “The road’s clear.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Robin had told him. “The rule is, you have to stop.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Stephen said. “And you still do it?” Why did he need a sign? He had good eyesight, he could see in the dark on a moonless night; if a rabbit had darted into the road, he would have spotted it in time and stepped on the brakes.

  “Now you’re getting it,” Connor told Stephen. “There’s a rule for everything.”

  “Problem, Officer?” Robin said when George came up to the driver’s window.

  “I thought this was your vehicle, Robin,” George said. “Maybe your friend would like to show me his license.”

  “He’d love to, George, but he’s learning to drive. Don’t give us a hard time.” She held up the apple pie she’d bought at the store, then warmed in the oven, so her grandfather would think it was homemade. “Old Dick’s waiting for us.”

  Stephen noticed the gun George wore near his waist, but he forced himself to stare straight ahead and keep his hands on the steering wheel. He knew what guns did; they blew into you so that whatever you had been once seeped into the ground. He’d had brothers taken that way: men always appeared suddenly, and they called out some sort of curses before they fired the first shots. When that happened, Stephen knew, you had to run, and even then you might not get away. The muscles along Stephen’s jaw tightened. He wished he were wearing the black coat. Then, if this man reached for his gun, Stephen could pull out his knife. He could do it so quickly that the gun would never be fired.

  “I hope your friend’s got his learner’s permit,” George said. He was usually the last one to hear gossip, but even he knew that Roy had reason to be bitter. This guy didn’t even have anything to offer her, that’s what got to Roy most.

  “Come on, George,” Connor said. “Give him a break.”