Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Twenty-three

It was only three thirty, but already both lanes of the imaginatively named main road, Shell Drive, were packed with crawling vehicles. Half of them were putty-colored sedans filled with gray-headed, putty-colored people. They were the used-to-be working class, retired to planned activities and dinner at four on Windward Island. The other half were dinged trucks, faded SUVs, and beater Jeeps like mine. They were driven by sun-darkened people, the still-struggling service class. Both lanes were choked, so I couldn’t tell who was coming or going, but maybe that’s the way it always was on an island that had only one main road: Everyone was always coming and going simultaneously.

I supposed that was what I was doing, too. I was coming and going simultaneously; chasing a woman who might be alive, or who might be dead; hunting a girl who’d changed my life, or a woman I’d never known. Or both.

I followed the throng inching south toward the middle of the island, scanning both sides of the road for a place to stay. Windward was going upscale. Interspersed along one stretch of classy-looking restaurants was a barbecue joint with a skull-and-bones sign, a garage that did oil changes and repaired marine engines, and a shack trying to pass itself as selling authentic Chicago-style hot dogs. It was a fraud, that shack; its outdoor counter was lined with ketchup bottles. Chicagoans know that ketchup has as much place on a hot dog as motor oil.

Every motel had a NO VACANCY sign dangling out front. That was no surprise. It was March, the time when the hordes from the north descend on the Florida beaches to blister themselves, incubating little carcinomas. A digital sign outside a bank said the temperature was ninety-two degrees.

Ten minutes later, but only a mile down, I spotted a turquoise two-story motel with pink shutters and an almost empty parking lot, right on the beach. Its sign said simply ROOMS and appeared to be too solidly rusted to its metal pole to creak if there’d been a breeze. The place looked just seedy enough to offer cheap rates. I swung in, parked next to the pickup truck that was the only vehicle in the crushed shell lot, and extracted myself from the micro-rental.

I pushed open the screen door. The lobby was dark, and so dank it made me wonder why the old guy behind the counter wasn’t wearing a snorkel.

“Nine hundred for the week,” he said.

I turned to go.

“What were you looking to spend?” he asked from behind me.

“Fifty a night,” I said to the screen.

He laughed. “In tourist season?”

I put my hand on the door handle. A screen on a windless, blistering day explained the empty parking lot.

“One ten a night,” he said.

“You got air-conditioning?”

“Make it ninety.”

“Fifty-five a night,” I said.

“How long you going to stay?”

“Maybe a week.” I turned and walked back to the counter. It wouldn’t take that long to check out the details of Carolina Dare’s life. If I became certain that she was Maris, though, it might take that long to walk the beaches she’d walked, smell the salt air she’d breathed, see her dawns, feel her sunsets.

It might very well take a whole week to kiss a ghost.

I gave the guy a check for two nights.

“You told me a week,” he said.

“Depends on whether I can catch a breeze in the room.”

I carried my duffel and my Oreos up the outside staircase. My room had windows facing both the beach and Shell Drive. Depending on the breeze, if one arose, I’d either be savoring salt air or sucking auto exhaust. Of such is life.

The hot and cold water worked, and the toilet flushed. The bed’s headboard and the top of the dresser were sticky, as though the salt air were dissolving the laminate. I took that to be a good sign. If I was sharing the room with cockroaches, they’d stick to the Formica and might drown in the humidity, standing up. I unzipped the duffel, changed into a red knit shirt and blue plaid shorts, colors made all the more vivid by my northern skin, and went out.

Traffic was easing as I started back up Shell Drive toward the northeastern part of Windward Island. The bank thermometer said the temperature was now ninety-four degrees. It was getting hotter as the sun was setting. I wondered if that was a sign of Doomsday and regretted not buying more Oreos.

The Copper Scupper was at the very tip of the island, a bleached-board place with white metal furniture, green umbrellas, and a planked deck on the sand. The waiters and waitresses wore khaki shorts, and Hawaiian shirts like Leo’s, except that theirs fit. A sign said to wait to be seated, so I did, watching a guy in an orange parrot shirt and pink baseball cap plug in an electric keyboard-readying himself, no doubt, for Margaritaville music.

A hostess, deeply tanned, fiftyish, and with the courage to let her hair go gray, came out from the inside dining room. She led me to a table at the end of the deck, mercifully the one farthest from the would-be Buffett. She handed me a menu and told me a waitress would be right with me. The waitress was, in less than a minute, and I ordered a gin and tonic.

While I waited, I pulled my cell phone out of my shorts and checked for messages. Nobody had called, not Leo, not Amanda. That was no surprise. I owed them both apologies, but I wouldn’t know what to say, or how to say it, until I finished up on Windward Island. My drink came. For a time, I let the sun and the gin and the tonic wash at the knots in my head as I watched the sun make curving silver lines on the crests of the waves in the Gulf of Mexico.

My waitress came by and asked if I wanted another gin and tonic. It seemed that kind of night, so I said sure. Before she could leave, I asked my question.

“Did Carolina Dare used to work here?”

Her eyes narrowed, but she could have been squinting from the sun sinking toward the water.

“You a friend?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She smiled because she was a good waitress, used to clever lines from solitary male drinkers. “There’s no Carolina Dare working here,” she said.

“What I meant was, I didn’t know her by that name. It was a long time ago. I could be asking about the wrong woman.”

She kept the smile fixed on her face. “Why would you be asking at all?”

“I’m getting her mail, and it’s being forwarded from here.”

“From the Copper Scupper?” She grinned, still parrying.

“From Windward Island.”

“Have the crab cake sandwich and float another one of those,” she said, pointing to the lime resting at the bottom of my empty glass. She walked away.

Twenty minutes later a server, a girl, twenty, taut and tanned, brought me my food and the second drink. She left too quickly for me to ask her about Carolina, perhaps afraid that the whiteness of my skin might leach the bronze out of her like a sponge in a glass of water. The crab cake sandwich was delicious, flaky, and free of mayo. It was the best I’d ever had, though in truth, it was the only crab cake sandwich I’d ever had. Restaurateurs in Rivertown, like Kutz, don’t go netting in the Willahock for delicacies, rightly fearing that something bigger might come back at them, angry, from the tires in the murky water.

By the time I’d finished, the Copper Scupper had filled with music lovers, sitting with their backs turned to the now-crooning Buffett and his rhythm machine. I searched the crowd for my original waitress. She’d known something, and I wanted another chance to use my clever investigative techniques on her. I didn’t see her. When my server passed by, I asked for my waitress.

She smiled big, white teeth at me from a safe distance. “Mary? She got off a half hour ago.”

A change in clever investigative technique was in order. “I’m an old friend of Carolina Dare’s,” I said. “She used to work here?”

The sweet young thing smiled again and shook her head. “I’m just taking a break from college,” she said. “I’ve only been here a month.”

I asked her to bring me coffee. The sun was low over the water, changing the silver-tipped eddies to red. A couple walked on the beach, close, one slow silhouette against the setting sun. It was a good night for lovers.

“I have to stay after, get some help with physics,” Maris said in the hall before the last period of the day. It was the third week of February.

“I’ll wait,” I blurted, and then suddenly froze at what my mouth, with no provocation from my brain, had just said.

She smiled. “I’m glad.“

Two hours later, we went out the back doors of Rivertown High. The sun was beginning to set.

“Leo tells me you have no parents,” she said as we got to the bottom of the concrete steps.

“My mother took off a week after I was born. She was a sophomore right here at Rivertown High.”

“And your father?”

“Some guy named Elstrom but otherwise unknown, at least to me.”

“You live with her sisters?”

“The three of them pass me around, from living room couch to living room couch, a month at a time. I’m like the pea that carnival guys hide in those three-walnut shell games.” I was trying to sound-metaphorical, like the literary heroes she and Leo shared.

She was too kind to laugh. “They don’t like you?”

“One sister, Lillian, does. When I stay with her, it’s like a vacation; good food, television, sometimes a movie at the theater. The other two say I look like my mother. I keep my stuff in a suitcase that I never unpack.”

Walking home, it was easy to tell her things that, until that afternoon, I hadn’t known to tell myself. We talked about everything and nothing and lingered outside the pinball parlor below her apartment, oblivious to the cars passing by and the other people jostling us on the sidewalk. It wasn’t until five forty-five that I realized I was an hour late for work. It didn’t matter. I ran to the laundry sucking air ten thousand times purer than I’d ever tasted before.

“Will there be anything else, sir?” Another young, Hawaiian-shirted waitress was back with the pot of coffee. She’d brought the check a half hour before, about the time the sun disappeared into the water. She hadn’t known Carolina Dare, either.

“Thanks, no. I’ve taken up this table long enough.” I signed the credit card slip and made my way across the deck to the exit, bringing with me just enough residue from the gins to make me feel old.

“Carolina Dare,” a voice said from the shadow of the entrance to the bar.

I stopped and turned. It was the hostess, the gray-haired woman with the deep tan.

“You’ve been asking about Carolina Dare.”

“Yes,” I said.

A group of three couples came up then, smelling of whiskey. She motioned for me to wait, walked them to a table by the sand, and came back.

By that time, another couple had come up to stand next to me.

“Coffee at nine tomorrow,” she said to me and named a restaurant.

“On Shell Drive?” I asked.

She smiled. “If it’s not on Shell Drive, it’s in the water.” I drove back to my motel and climbed the stairs to the second floor. My room was hot. I opened the windows to catch a breeze, should one come along, took off my clothes, and lay on the bed. Outside, somewhere in the dark along the beach, intermingled with the soft sounds of the surf lapping at the shore, young voices were laughing. I heard Maris’s among them, lilting and light.

“Vlodek,” she teased, “you’re so serious.”