Cocoa Beach

  Lydia reflects on this. Glances at Samuel, who’s standing next to a tree, arms crossed, wearing an expression of deep discomfort. “We’re sisters, you know,” she says idly.

  I shrug again.

  “My father sired her in Borneo. Nobody ever mentioned it, of course—terribly awkward—but you only have to look at us together. And then we were born in the same week. One can only imagine, eh?”

  She means to shock me, naturally. Maybe I’m shocked; I don’t know. I’m so accustomed to shocks, they’ve left me numb. Numb and rather cold, you see, so that I no longer feel any particular emotion at this singular detail of Clara’s conception, except a raw and painful fear reserved for Evelyn, sleeping now along the length of the Ford’s backseat—a fear I keep in check by force, because I must. And a sort of otherworldly curiosity. I’ve never seen Lydia’s father, either in person or in a photograph, but I now imagine he was a slightly built man, handsome, and his eyes were almost certainly blue.

  “Borneo seems to have been a bad idea all around,” I say calmly.

  “Doesn’t it? Except I reckon Clara would rather have been born than not, even if she’s a cuckoo in the nest.” She says this without bitterness, but as she speaks I wonder if this piece of information, flung so carelessly into the open, isn’t the key to everything. That’s what the psychologists would say, isn’t it? That the sins of the father redound on the head of the daughter, penetrating deep into the chambers of the unconscious where they shoot about like tennis balls in a drawing room, smashing all the china and disfiguring the paintwork.

  “Look,” I say, “if it’s money you want, you can have it. I don’t give a damn. I’ll write you a check the instant we arrive at Maitland, if you’ll promise to leave us alone. Leave Florida, leave the country. Go back to England.”

  Lydia sucks on her cigarette and turns to Samuel. “You see, darling? This is why I adore you. Everybody else only wants to get rid of me.”

  “How much?” asks Samuel. Addressing me.

  “Fifty thousand dollars.”

  A burst of laughter from Lydia. “Not nearly enough, I’m afraid. That’s—what? Ten thousand pounds or so. Do you know how long that lasted us in England? Three years.”

  “Three years?”

  “Less, really. I’m rather extravagant.” She looks modestly at her hands.

  The headlights make a lurid, conical glow on our bodies. I gaze at Lydia and her small, self-satisfied smile, then at Samuel, whose stiff face reveals no emotion at all, no human pleasure, and my mind seems to expand, like the coming dawn, to take in all of this, the vast reach of their fraud. And I think, Why, this is the real proof, isn’t it? A piece of hard, genuine evidence that Simon, in his last letter, was telling me the truth.

  “You tricked my father. That check he sent to Simon, to keep him from bothering me. That was you. You were the one who took his money, not Simon.”

  “I hadn’t much choice, had I? Simon left me with nothing. Not even my own child.”

  “As if you cared about Sammy. Either of you. I’d ask which brother he belongs to, but I don’t suppose it matters.”

  “Oh, I’m happy to tell you. He belongs to Simon, of course. A little lie, I understand, on the part of my dear ex-husband, which amuses me terribly, even now. But that was always his weakness. Women, I mean, not lying. But the one usually follows the other, I’ve found.”

  Samuel turns away and puts his hand on the trunk of the tree.

  “Yes,” I say. “Look at Samuel. Everything he’s done for your sake. All the lies he told me, and I believed him. Because of my father, you see. Because my father killed my mother, and I saw everything—everything—through a glass, all distorted, so that whatever Simon said or did—”

  Lydia starts to laugh. “Oh, you poor dear child. You poor deluded thing. You really haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  She turns to Samuel. “You didn’t tell her? Show her the newspapers?”

  “I don’t read newspapers,” I say.

  “My God. The story was everywhere. I tried to keep it from you—that’s why I took you to Maitland to begin with—but I thought you must have learned by now—”

  “Learned what?”

  “Dear child. Your father didn’t kill your mother. It was the kitchen maid. Well, her lover, rather, but your lovestruck father decided to protect her. All those years.” She shakes her head.

  I stare at her and then at Samuel. The air reels around my ears. “Is this true? Father’s innocent?”

  He shrugs. “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid he’s dead now, however,” Lydia says. “There was a confrontation. The lover shot him dead, to keep him quiet. I don’t remember the details.”

  “Lydia, stop! For God’s sake. Look at her.”

  I’m sinking to my knees in the warm grass. Hands over mouth. I think, It’s too much. And then, She’s lying, she must be lying. I turn to Samuel, whose familiar eyes regard me with a rare expression of pity, though his arms remain crossed over his broad chest, and the yellow glare of the headlamps shadow his face like a demon’s. He shakes his head and turns away, and I know it’s true.

  “Good news and bad news, you might say,” Lydia chirps. Lifts her cigarette carelessly to her lips. “But at least it’s relieved you of a tremendous psychological burden. I have a friend who’s an analyst, a head doctor, and he says there’s nothing more damaging for a girl than a father she can’t trust. Why, anyone can see what it’s done for you! But better late than never.”

  My hands fall to my sides. A curious numbness overtakes me, as if my nerves, vanquished, have simply switched themselves off. I think, I must stay calm. I must set aside all these things, all this grief clawing at the back of my head, because of Evelyn. To save Evelyn. I rise to my feet—my God, the effort—and I hear myself saying, in a cold voice, “No. It is too late. Simon’s dead, too. Samuel killed him.”

  Lydia flicks a nub of ash into the dirt. “So I understand. Terrible shame. But it doesn’t change anything, does it? You’ve still got all the money. His final revenge on me.”

  “It wasn’t revenge at all, I think. It was only justice.”

  “Of course it was revenge. Or some sort of insurance, if you like. Either way, they mean the same thing. Justice is a beautiful word, a damned noble word, but it’s just revenge, all dressed up for legal purposes. He had no right to rob me like that. My father’s business. No right at all.” She grows a little passionate now, tossing the cigarette into the dirt and smashing it with her heel. “Thank God he’s dead now. What a favor you’ve done me.”

  “It was Samuel who pulled the trigger.”

  Samuel says nothing to this. He stands apart, hands braced in his pockets, staring east as if to haul the sun above the horizon by the power of his gaze. Or else to smash it back down. To go back. I can see the edge of his cheek, a piece of his nose. The dark hair curling around his neck.

  “My hero,” Lydia says, not following my gaze. She’s looking instead at the Ford. Her eyes are still fierce—penetrating the metal skin to my daughter sleeping within—but the smile’s disappeared into a round, speculative knot. What a sharp little figure she makes, what a contrast to the soft-edged fairy who danced into my bedroom last month. As if she’s taken the blade of a razor and applied it to her boundaries, trimming away the excess. In the silent, deserted morning, she might be a figurine on somebody’s desk. But no. Now her hand forms a fist. Her voice bites the air. “I hope he suffered. Do you think he suffered, Samuel?”

  “I blew his brains out, Lydia.”

  “Don’t sound so bitter, darling. Remember what he did to you. Remember what he did to me. Stuck in that fetid basement for weeks. Do you know what I had to do to escape? I had to seduce one of my own guards. Lousy, stinking, ugly little chap. His breath, my God, like the stink of hell.”

  “Good,” I say. “You’ll be used to it, then.”

  Samuel whips around. “Be quiet!”

  “You know I’m right
, Samuel. You know what she is. My God, listen to her! Don’t be such a fool.”

  “Samuel understands the truth,” Lydia snaps.

  He’s breathing hard. I can see the movement of his chest beneath his shirt, the flex of his fingers.

  “Samuel, please,” I say. “Don’t let her do this. You know what she’s capable of. You know she won’t be satisfied with money. She’ll have to kill me afterward, because she knows I can destroy her now. She knows I know the truth.”

  “Oh, nonsense. All I want is what’s mine. What belonged to my father and now belongs to me. I’m a terribly reasonable person, aren’t I, Samuel?”

  I raise my voice to a bark. “Your father ran that company into the ground, and Simon built it up again by his own effort. A thing you couldn’t have done in a thousand years. You just take, that’s all you do. You take things and chew them up and spit them out again, when they’ve given up all their flavor. If I gave you every penny I own, you wouldn’t try to buy more orchards or invest in more ships. Oh, no. You’d just spend it all on hotels and dresses and jewelry and leave everything to rot.”

  Lydia smiles faintly and turns to Samuel. Her small, elegant hands make a cradle in the air. “Well, darling? Aren’t you going to defend me?”

  “I have stood by you through everything,” he says hoarsely.

  “Of course you have. As I’ve stood by you, haven’t I? I’ve never asked a single thing of you that wasn’t just and right. And I’ve suffered so much for your sake.”

  It’s the strangest thing. As she speaks to him, supplicating, her soft edges have returned, blurring the outline of her in the sunrise, and I realize that she’s wearing the same dress she wore when I first met her. That blue dress with the innocent white polka dots. Samuel gazes at her, his feet buried in the dirt, his hands clenched beside his enormous thighs. Utterly absorbed in the sight of her and the cadence of her voice.

  “Your own brother took me like an animal in the garden,” she says, “and you weren’t there to help me. You were gone. I had come round to comfort your poor mother, and he was drunk, as ever, and he lured me outside and he took me in the grass—”

  “Quiet!” Samuel says in anguish.

  “—and he must have liked it well enough, because he came to visit me at my house the next day, and you know my father, he always turned to jelly with Simon, he adored him, he practically threw me at him. What could I do? You were gone!” She’s sobbing now, actually sobbing in her throat. “He used to take me in the conservatory, that was his favorite spot, on the chaise, he would make me take off my dress—”

  “She’s lying,” I say.

  “Am I? Did Simon tell you that? That I was to blame somehow for his taking my innocence? I seduced him? Did he say—oh, let me guess—did he say we only did it once? Because just once is enough, you know, to start a baby—”

  Samuel seizes her by the shoulders. “My God! Enough!”

  “You see? You see why I couldn’t ever bear to go to bed with you? I wasn’t being cruel, oh darling, I just couldn’t, not after the way your brother defiled me—look out!”

  I’m sprinting for the Ford, throwing open the driver’s door, trying to scramble inside. But Samuel—large, lumbering Samuel—takes on the agility of a tennis player. A tennis player chasing the deciding ball. He lunges for me. Catches me by the ribs, by the neck, drags me from the car into the dirt. I hear Evelyn’s wail in the air above me, sailing over Samuel’s angry head.

  “Let me go,” I whisper. “You’ve had your revenge. You’ve killed him. Just let me go, for God’s sake.”

  “He’s got to pay.”

  “He has paid.”

  “Just give her the money.”

  “She can have the money. Whatever she wants. Just let us go, please, let us—”

  Samuel starts up suddenly, drawing me with him.

  “Do you hear that?” says Lydia in a low voice.

  I can’t hear anything, next to Samuel’s thick arm and his beating heart, except for Evelyn’s hysterical cries. I would hear her voice through anything, through a stone wall, through an artillery barrage. My name. Mama, Mama, Mama. Her small arms, reaching toward me. Her red, wet, crumpled face.

  Right here. Mama’s right here. I strain against Samuel’s arm, kick him, pound him, Mama, Mama, she calls, streaming tears, and a shadow moves between us and swoops her out of the Ford’s open seat.

  “Darling,” Lydia coos. Cuddling my daughter close. Nuzzling her neck. “Sweetest darling love. It’s all right. Auntie’s here.”

  Evelyn cries, Mama, Mama. But with less conviction.

  Lydia settles Evelyn on her hip, cradling that delicate, writhing, damp little body, humming and smiling. Her eyes are half-lidded, as if in bliss. “Auntie’s here, sweetheart. Mama’s busy with Uncle Samuel.”

  “Give her to me,” I say in a terribly low voice. “Samuel, for God’s sake, let me go.”

  “Quiet!”

  “She’s my daughter!”

  “She’s not going to hurt her.”

  Lydia, carrying Evelyn, turns away from me, cooing and soothing, the picture of an affectionate aunt, Madonna and child, and in the diminishing of Evelyn’s cries, above my own desperate whispers, I hear a faint, high drone emerge from the east.

  “Someone’s coming!”

  “Yes.”

  My body goes limp. A wild, frantic hope moves my pulse. I think, I must remain calm. This is a gift from God, my only chance. God above, let them stop. Let them see us and stop the car.

  Samuel’s head lowers to my ear. “Don’t try it.”

  “Try what?”

  “Do something.” Lydia’s voice carries across the air, singsong, from the direction of the tree. “They’re going to think we’ve broken down. They’re going to stop.”

  Samuel hesitates an instant, and in that precious speck of time I try to think of something to say, anything to soften him, to change his mind, while the drone of the car deepens and strengthens, focusing into a point up the road we’ve just traveled.

  “Samuel—”

  He turns me around and locks me in his arms and starts to kiss me. I try to move my hands, to maneuver them between our bodies to push his shoulders, but he’s far too big, his body smashed against mine like a brick wall, his hands simultaneously pulling at my dress and trapping me in place. I lift my knee and he pushes me backward, against the door of the car, his mouth so hard and brutal I can’t move my jaw, I can’t speak, I can’t breathe, my tongue tastes blood. Spots. I’m dizzy, I’m going to faint. The sound of the engine roars near, the brakes shriek.

  “Need help, buddy?”

  Samuel lifts his head at last. “Does it look like I need help?” he snarls, in a perfect American accent.

  I reach deep in my lungs for enough breath to scream, but Samuel grasps the back of my head and his mouth smashes down on mine in a grotesque pantomime of sexual passion. I flail my arms, trying to make some kind of signal, some show of distress, but the engine revs high and the tires squeal softly, and Evelyn’s laughter rings in my ears from some distant point, where Lydia is amusing her. Help, says my throat, says my brain, turning dark at the edges, the engine fainter and fainter, and Samuel lifts his head and lets me go.

  I slide down his chest and legs to my knees, coughing and gasping, spitting out saliva and blood, and he takes me by the shoulders. “Sorry. Sorry.”

  “Bastard.”

  “I’m sorry.” He hauls me back up and digs for a handkerchief or a cigarette, I don’t know which.

  “Put her back in the car,” calls Lydia.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Why, to Maitland,” she says. “Where else?”

  Chapter 30

  Maitland Plantation, Florida, July 25, 1922

  I remember the night we fled Connecticut. Only a few days had passed since my mother died, and we were staying at a hotel of some kind, I don’t remember the name. Just that it was somewhere on the outskirts of town, and there was a small, blue v
iew of Long Island Sound from one window.

  Father woke me sometime in the middle of the night, when the sky was nearly black and the moon was absent. He had already packed our things. He shook me gently, and I woke at once and did as he said. I took Sophie from the bed (she slept next to me, curling like a giant doll into the curve of my arm) and wrapped her in a blanket. I remember feeling terribly guilty that we took that blanket without asking. We went down the back stairs and into the automobile waiting outside. The electric motor whirred softly. Though the air was warm, my father kept the top up, and we drove without speaking along the narrow lanes, avoiding the Boston Post Road until we were several miles south into New York state.

  What I remember most was the silence. The dense, awful stillness inside that car, like a hole underground, surrounded by earth. Sophie slept on my lap, golden curls catching the rare glow from a streetlamp, while the air pressed intolerably against my skin. Father’s hands clenched the tiller. He didn’t smoke, had never so much as touched a cigarette in his life, and his fingers had nothing else to do. Just held that steering tiller in a dead man’s grip and expressed nothing. Not a word passed his teeth. I had to guess where we were headed, why we were headed there, and it was not until the horizon climbed before us, the unmistakable ragged-edge skyline of Manhattan, that I knew for certain. And even then, I wondered if we were only passing through on our way to somewhere else.

  And maybe I still feel that way. Maybe I’m still driving along that midnight road, which spent only an hour or two on the clock and seemed to go on into infinity. No possible end. No place to rest.

  The engine of Samuel’s flivver runs louder than our old electric Columbia, and instead of setting her teeth in silence, Lydia keeps up a never-ending patter of conversation. Every so often she stops to ask a question of a purely rhetorical nature—Don’t you think, darling? or Wasn’t it smashing?—to which Samuel replies yes or no, according to her desire. Her mania exhausts me. I wonder if she’s taken a drug of some kind, one of those drawing room powders you hear about, such is the furious, fizzy tempo of her speech, and then I think, no, that’s not it. She doesn’t need fairy dust. It’s the thrill of the chase that’s got her stoned. She’s flying high on her own cleverness, her own capacity for deceit. The sheer joy of whatever evil she’s about to commit.