He looked at me with a child's defiance, watching for how I'd react to what is now so coyly referred to as "the f-bomb." I didn't react, of course. I was too busy processing the sense to worry about his choice of words.
"So," I said. "I guess what you're saying is an extra fruit smoothie won't help."
He threw back his head and laughed. The laughter turned into the worst coughing fit yet. Alarmed, I went to him and pounded his back...but gently. It felt as if there were nothing under there but chicken bones. Milo barked once and put his paws up on one of Mike's wasted legs.
There were two pitchers on the table, water in one and fresh-squeezed orange juice in the other. Mike pointed to the water and I poured him half a glass. When I tried to hold it for him, he gave me an impatient look--even with the coughing fit still wracking him--and took it himself. He spilled some on his shirt, but most of it went down his throat, and the coughing eased.
"That was a bad one," he said, patting his chest. "My heart's going like a bastard. Don't tell my mother."
"Jesus, kid! Like she doesn't know?"
"She knows too much, that's what I think," Mike said. "She knows I might have three more good months and then four or five really bad ones. Like, in bed all the time, not able to do anything but suck oxygen and watch MASH and Fat Albert. The only question is whether or not she'll let Grammy and Grampa Ross come to the funeral." He'd coughed hard enough to make his eyes water, but I didn't mistake that for tears. He was bleak, but in control. Last evening, when the kite went up and he felt it tugging the twine, he had been younger than his age. Now I was watching him struggle to be a lot older. The scary thing was how well he was succeeding. His eyes met mine, dead-on. "She knows. She just doesn't know that I know."
The back door banged. We looked and saw Annie crossing the patio, heading for the boardwalk.
"Why would I need to know, Mike?"
He shook his head. "I don't have any idea. But you can't talk about it to Mom, okay? It just upsets her. I'm all she's got." He said this last not with pride but a kind of gloomy realism.
"All right."
"Oh, one other thing. I almost forgot." He shot a glance at her, saw she was only halfway down the boardwalk, and turned back to me. "It's not white."
"What's not white?"
Mike Ross looked mystified. "No idea. When I woke up this morning, I remembered you were coming for smoothies, and that came into my head. I thought you'd know."
Annie arrived. She had poured a mini-smoothie into a juice glass. On top was a single strawberry.
"Yum!" Mike said. "Thanks, Mom!"
"You're very welcome, hon."
She eyed his wet shirt but didn't mention it. When she asked me if I wanted some more juice, Mike winked at me. I said more juice would be great. While she poured, Mike fed Milo two heaping spoonfuls of his smoothie.
She turned back to him, and looked at the smoothie glass, now half empty. "Wow, you really were hungry."
"Told you."
"What were you and Mr. Jones--Devin--talking about?"
"Nothing much," Mike said. "He's been sad, but he's better now."
I said nothing, but I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. When I dared a look at Annie, she was smiling.
"Welcome to Mike's world, Devin," she said, and I must have looked like I'd swallowed a goldfish, because she burst out laughing. It was a nice sound.
That evening when I walked back from Joyland, she was standing at the end of the boardwalk, waiting for me. It was the first time I'd seen her in a blouse and skirt. And she was alone. That was a first, too.
"Devin? Got a second?"
"Sure," I said, angling up the sandy slope to her. "Where's Mike?"
"He has physical therapy three times a week. Usually Janice--she's his therapist--comes in the morning, but I arranged for her to come this evening instead, because I wanted to speak to you alone."
"Does Mike know that?"
Annie smiled ruefully. "Probably. Mike knows far more than he should. I won't ask what you two talked about after he got rid of me this morning, but I'm guessing that his...insights...come as no surprise to you."
"He told me why he's in a wheelchair, that's all. And he mentioned he had pneumonia last Thanksgiving."
"I wanted to thank you for the kite, Dev. My son has very restless nights. He's not in pain, exactly, but he has trouble breathing when he's asleep. It's like apnea. He has to sleep in a semi-sitting position, and that doesn't help. Sometimes he stops breathing completely, and when he does, an alarm goes off and wakes him up. Only last night--after the kite--he slept right through. I even went in once, around two AM, to make sure the monitor wasn't malfunctioning. He was sleeping like a baby. No restless tossing and turning, no nightmares--he's prone to them--and no moaning. It was the kite. It satisfied him in a way nothing else possibly could. Except maybe going to that damned amusement park of yours, which is completely out of the question." She stopped, then smiled. "Oh, shit. I'm making a speech."
"It's all right," I said.
"It's just that I've had so few people to talk to. I have housekeeping help--a very nice woman from Heaven's Bay--and of course there's Janice, but it's not the same." She took a deep breath. "Here's the other part. I was rude to you on several occasions, and with no cause. I'm sorry."
"Mrs....Miss..." Shit. "Annie, you don't have anything to apologize for."
"Yes. I do. You could have just walked on when you saw me struggling with the kite, and then Mike wouldn't have gotten that good night's rest. All I can say is that I have problems trusting people."
This is where she invites me in for supper, I thought. But she didn't. Maybe because of what I said next.
"You know, he could come to the park. It'd be easy to arrange, and with it closed and all, he could have the run of the place."
Her face closed up hard, like a hand into a fist. "Oh, no. Absolutely not. If you think that, he didn't tell you as much about his condition as I thought he did. Please don't mention it to him. In fact, I have to insist."
"All right," I said. "But if you change your mind..."
I trailed off. She wasn't going to change her mind. She looked at her watch, and a new smile lit her face. It was so brilliant you could almost overlook how it never reached her eyes. "Oh boy, look how late it's getting. Mike will be hungry after his PE, and I haven't done a thing about supper. Will you excuse me?"
"Sure."
I stood there watching her hurry back down the boardwalk to the green Victorian--the one I was probably never going to see the inside of, thanks to my big mouth. But the idea of taking Mike through Joyland had seemed so right. During the summer, we had groups of kids with all sorts of problems and disabilities--crippled kids, blind kids, cancer kids, kids who were mentally challenged (what we called retarded back in the unenlightened seventies). It wasn't as though I expected to stick Mike in the front car of the Delirium Shaker and then blast him off. Even if the Shaker hadn't been buttoned up for the winter, I'm not a total idiot.
But the merry-go-round was still operational, and surely he could ride that. Ditto the train that ran through the Wiggle-Waggle Village. I was sure Fred Dean wouldn't mind me touring the kid through Mysterio's Mirror Mansion, either. But no. No. He was her delicate hothouse flower, and she intended to keep it that way. The thing with the kite had just been an aberration, and the apology a bitter pill she felt she had to swallow.
Still, I couldn't help admiring how quick and lithe she was, moving with a grace her son would never know. I watched her bare legs under the hem of her skirt and thought about Wendy Keegan not at all.
I had the weekend free, and you know what happened. I guess the idea that it always rains on the weekends must be an illusion, but it sure doesn't seem like one; ask any working stiff who ever planned to go camping or fishing on his days off.
Well, there was always Tolkien. I was sitting in my chair by the window on Saturday afternoon, moving ever deeper into the mountains of Mordor with Frodo and Sam,
when Mrs. Shoplaw knocked on the door and asked if I'd like to come down to the parlor and play Scrabble with her and Tina Ackerley. I am not at all crazy about Scrabble, having suffered many humiliations at the hands of my aunts Tansy and Naomi, who each have a huge mental vocabulary of what I still think of as "Scrabble shit-words"--stuff like suq, tranq, and bhoot (an Indian ghost, should you wonder). Nevertheless, I said I'd love to play. Mrs. Shoplaw was my landlady, after all, and diplomacy takes many forms.
On our way downstairs, she confided, "We're helping Tina bone up. She's quite the Scrabble-shark. She's entered in some sort of tournament in Atlantic City next weekend. I believe there is a cash prize."
It didn't take long--maybe four turns--to discover that our resident librarian could have given my aunts all the game they could handle, and more. By the time Miss Ackerley laid down nubility (with the apologetic smile all Scrabble-sharks seem to have; I think they must practice it in front of their mirrors), Emmalina Shoplaw was eighty points behind. As for me...well, never mind.
"I don't suppose either of you know anything about Annie and Mike Ross, do you?" I asked during a break in the action (both women seemed to feel a need to study the board a looong time before laying down so much as a single tile). "They live on Beach Row in the big green Victorian?"
Miss Ackerley paused with her hand still inside the little brown bag of letters. Her eyes were big, and her thick lenses made them even bigger. "Have you met them?"
"Uh-huh. They were trying to fly a kite...well, she was...and I helped out a little. They're very nice. I just wondered...the two of them all alone in that big house, and him pretty sick..."
The look they exchanged was pure incredulity, and I started to wish I hadn't raised the subject.
"She talks to you?" Mrs. Shoplaw asked. "The Ice Queen actually talks to you?"
Not only talked to me, but gave me a fruit smoothie. Thanked me. Even apologized to me. But I said none of that. Not because Annie really had iced up when I presumed too much, but because to do so would have seemed disloyal, somehow.
"Well, a little. I got the kite up for them, that's all." I turned the board. It was Tina's, the pro kind with its own little built-in spindle. "Come on, Mrs. S. Your turn. Maybe you'll even make a word that's in my puny vocabulary."
"Given the correct positioning, puny can be worth seventy points," Tina Ackerley said. "Even more, if a y-word is connected to pun."
Mrs. Shoplaw ignored both the board and the advice. "You know who her father is, of course."
"Can't say I do." Although I did know she was on the outs with him, and big-time.
"Buddy Ross? As in The Buddy Ross Hour of Power? Ring any bells?"
It did, vaguely. I thought I might have heard some preacher named Ross on the radio in the costume shop. It kind of made sense. During one of my quick-change transformations into Howie, Dottie Lassen had asked me--pretty much out of a clear blue sky--if I had found Jesus. My first impulse had been to tell her that I didn't know He was lost, but I restrained it.
"One of those Bible-shouters, right?"
"Next to Oral Roberts and that Jimmy Swaggart fellow, he's just about the biggest of them," Mrs. S. said. "He broadcasts from this gigantic church--God's Citadel, he calls it--in Atlanta. His radio show goes out all over the country, and now he's getting more and more into TV. I don't know if the stations give him the time free, or if he has to buy it. I'm sure he can afford it, especially late at night. That's when the old folks are up with their aches and pains. His shows are half miracle healings and half pleas for more love-offerings."
"Guess he didn't have any luck healing his grandson," I said.
Tina withdrew her hand from the letter-bag with nothing in it. She had forgotten about Scrabble for the time being, which was a good thing for her hapless victims. Her eyes were sparkling. "You don't know any of this story, do you? Ordinarily I don't believe in gossip, but..." She dropped her voice to a confidential tone pitched just above a whisper. "...but since you've met them, I could tell you."
"Yes, please," I said. I thought one of my questions--how Annie and Mike came to be living in a huge house on one of North Carolina's ritziest beaches--had already been answered. It was Grampa Buddy's summer retreat, bought and paid for with love-offerings.
"He's got two sons," Tina said. "They're both high in his church--deacons or assistant pastors, I don't know what they call them exactly, because I don't go for that holy rolling stuff. The daughter, though, she was different. A sporty type. Horseback riding, tennis, archery, deer hunting with her father, quite a bit of competition shooting. All that got in the papers after her trouble started."
Now the CAMP PERRY shirt made sense.
"Around the time she turned eighteen, it all went to hell--quite literally, as he saw it. She went to what they call 'a secular-humanist college,' and by all accounts she was quite the wild child. Giving up the shooting competitions and tennis tournaments was one thing; giving up the church-going for parties and liquor and men was quite another. Also..." Tina lowered her voice. "Pot-smoking."
"Gosh," I said, "not that!"
Mrs. Shoplaw gave me a look, but Tina didn't notice. "Yes! That! She got into the newspapers, too, those tabloids, because she was pretty and rich, but mostly because of her father. And being fallen-away. That's what they call it. She was a scandal to that church of his, wearing miniskirts and going braless and all. Well, you know what those fundamentalists preach is straight out of the Old Testament, all that about the righteous being rewarded and sinners being punished even unto the seventh generation. And she did more than hit the party circuit down there in Green Witch Village." Tina's eyes were now so huge they looked on the verge of tumbling from their sockets and rolling down her cheeks. "She quit the NRA and joined the American Atheist Society!"
"Ah. And did that get in the papers?"
"Did it ever! Then she got pregnant, no surprise there, and when the baby turned out to have some sort of problem...cerebral palsy, I think--"
"Muscular dystrophy."
"Whatever it is, her father was asked about it on one of his crusade things, and do you know what he said?"
I shook my head, but thought I could make a pretty good guess.
"He said that God punishes the unbeliever and the sinner. He said his daughter was no different, and maybe her son's affliction would bring her back to God."
"I don't think it's happened yet," I said. I was thinking of the Jesus-kite.
"I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world," Mrs. Shoplaw said. "Religion is supposed to comfort."
"He's just a self-righteous old prig," Tina said. "No matter how many men she might have been with or how many joints of pot she might have smoked, she's still his daughter. And the child is still his grandson. I've seen that boy in town once or twice, either in a wheelchair or tottering along in those cruel braces he has to wear if he wants to walk. He seems like a perfectly nice boy, and she was sober. Also wearing a bra." She paused for further recollection. "I think."
"Her father might change," Mrs. Shoplaw said, "but I doubt it. Young women and young men grow up, but old women and old men just grow older and surer they've got the right on their side. Especially if they know scripture."
I remembered something my mother used to say. "The devil can quote scripture."
"And in a pleasing voice," Mrs. Shoplaw agreed moodily. Then she brightened. "Still, if the Reverend Ross is letting them use his place on Beach Row, maybe he's willing to let bygones be bygones. It might have crossed his mind by now that she was only a young girl, maybe not even old enough to vote. Dev, isn't it your turn?"
It was. I made tear. It netted me four points.
My drubbing wasn't merciful, but once Tina Ackerley really got rocking, it was relatively quick. I returned to my room, sat in my chair by the window, and tried to rejoin Frodo and Sam on the road to Mount Doom. I couldn't do it. I closed the book and stared out through the rain-wavery gl
ass at the empty beach and the gray ocean beyond. It was a lonely prospect, and at times like that, my thoughts had a way of turning back to Wendy--wondering where she was, what she was doing, and who she was with. Thinking about her smile, the way her hair fell against her cheek, the soft rise of her breasts in one of her seemingly endless supply of cardigan sweaters.
Not today. Instead of Wendy, I found myself thinking of Annie Ross and realizing I'd developed a small but powerful crush on her. The fact that nothing could come of it--she had to be ten years older than me, maybe twelve--only seemed to make things worse. Or maybe I mean better, because unrequited love does have its attractions for young men.
Mrs. S. had suggested that Annie's holier-than-thou father might be willing to let bygones be bygones, and I thought she might have something there. I'd heard that grandchildren had a way of softening stiff necks, and he might want to get to know the boy while there was still time. He could have found out (from the people he had everywhere) that Mike was smart as well as crippled. It was even possible he'd heard rumors that Mike had what Madame Fortuna called "the sight." Or maybe all that was too rosy. Maybe Mr. Fire-and-Brimstone had given her the use of the house in exchange for a promise that she'd keep her mouth shut and not brew up any fresh pot-and-miniskirt scandals while he was making the crucial transition from radio to television.
I could speculate until the cloud-masked sun went down, and not be sure of anything on Buddy Ross's account, but I thought I could be sure about one thing on Annie's: she was not ready to let bygones be bygones.
I got up and trotted downstairs to the parlor, fishing a scrap of paper with a phone number on it out of my wallet as I went. I could hear Tina and Mrs. S. in the kitchen, chattering away happily. I called Erin Cook's dorm, not expecting to get her on a Saturday afternoon; she was probably down in New Jersey with Tom, watching Rutgers football and singing the Scarlet Knights' fight song.
But the girl on phone duty said she'd get her, and three minutes later, her voice was in my ear.
"Dev, I was going to call you. In fact, I want to come down and see you, if I can get Tom to go along. I think I can, but it wouldn't be next weekend. Probably the one after."
I checked the calendar hanging on the wall and saw that would be the first weekend in October. "Have you actually found something out?"